Firstly, you don't have to go to great lengths to clean up the trade deficit between China and Britain. It is widely recognized that China had a trade surplus with the West for most of the time before the Opium War. Have you ever wondered why the Song Dynasty used the term 'ldquo' when compiling financial records; Guan, Shi, Pi, Liang, and Shu;, And in the Ming Dynasty, a whip method could be implemented, using silver as the base currency
Because the Age of Discovery had arrived, the Spanish discovered the Potosi silver mine in South America, and an enormous amount of silver flowed into China through trade. The simple and crude way for foreigners to solve the trade deficit is to ship Eagle Ocean directly to China to exchange goods
In 1751, four ships from England to China brought silver worth 119000 pounds, while the goods were only worth 10842 pounds. The value of silver was more than ten times that of goods [1]
The absurdity lies in the fact that this trade was beneficial to both the East and the West, because for Europeans, silver grew from the ground (mines in South America), and transporting a large amount of silver back to Europe would obviously lead to currency surplus and inflation; For China, a huge problem associated with the unified agricultural empire was the perennial shortage of currency supply. The Northern Song Dynasty strictly prohibited the outflow of small coins, and the Sichuan Shaanxi region could only use extremely inconvenient iron coins for a long time. This even gave birth to the world's earliest currency exchange, and the influx of large amounts of silver allowed China to finally use silver as its standard currency after the Ming Dynasty
Xiaonu once estimated that one-third of American silver ultimately flowed into China, and another one-third flowed into India and the Ottoman Empire (quoted from Adshead 1993). Weifei De (1986:3) believed that perhaps half of the American silver ultimately flowed into China. [2] So who got hurt in this process& hellip;
Native Americans: Smile, keep smiling
So the first viewpoint that the questioner came up with is incorrect:
Only customers who buy the wrong products, no merchants who sell the wrong products, no one comes all the way to you to make a loss making deal through hardships and hardships< If you don't think silver is a commodity, then you will find that Europeans have always been so narrow-minded, they have been doing it all along; I came all the way to you to make a loss making deal with you; This kind of thing
But why couldn't this loss making business continue around 1840& hellip;
Because in the early 19th century, South America began to experience revolutions and seek independence
From 1810 to 1819, the amount of silver coins minted in Mexico decreased to about 40% of its previous level. By 1840, although the amount of coins had recovered to some extent, the quality of coins was not as good as before. This type of silver coin was greatly reduced when it flowed into China; Discount” Used. At the same time, Britain's own overseas trade was not smooth. In 1802, Britain's total export volume was 45102330 pounds, and in 1819&mdash& mdash; Note that at this point, the Seventh Coalition has already defeated Napoleon& mdash; The total export value dropped to 35208321 pounds. And the most crucial point is that in 1784, Britain lowered the tariff on imported tea from China from 110% to 10%, which expanded the tea trade to an extremely considerable extent. If there was not enough silver to come to China to exchange for tea, what would the gentlemen in London do
What needs to be clarified here is that the other viewpoint of the questioner is also very absurd:
Without sugar, the British will not import tea from China
In fact, tea has played an extremely important role in the East West trade since the 1820s:
Tea is God, and in front of it, everything else can be sacrificed. In England, tea became the national drink after defeating coffee, because the initial image of tea in the British Empire was; Luxury goods of the upper class: In 1662, Charles II married Catherine, who brought tea as a dowry to the British royal family and promoted the custom of drinking tea in the palace, which then expanded to the entire British aristocratic circle and finally became popular among the people. Therefore, in England, tea is actually a wonderful drink that combines functional drinks and cultural symbols
So the questioner is correct; Sugar” The understanding of the role played in English tea is completely wrong. Adding sugar to tea was originally because both of them are luxury goods, and drinking them together would be boundless wealth. It is interesting that when the tea trade became increasingly developed and lower class people began to afford tea, the sugarcane plantations in the Americas also developed, and the import of sugar also increased. Therefore, these two have always been a good match. And the British government is very happy to see the popularization of tea, because on the one hand, it can levy huge import tariffs from it, and on the other hand, after the Industrial Revolution, workers did need a beverage to replace alcohol: if you drink too much alcohol, you will have to use machine tools; There was a real accident. I drank too much tea to pee my pants. Of course, a small episode here is that the English people initially focused on coffee, but coffee really has no taste for tea&hellip& hellip;
This led to two extremely serious consequences. Firstly, tea gradually became the largest commodity imported by the East India Company from China, and it was not one of them; At the same time, tea tax also became a major tax source in the UK, accounting for 1/12 of the total tax revenue around 1820 if I remember correctly
Come on, travel back to 1800 and go to London to find Sir Tom. Tell him not to drink tea anymore and cut off the tea trade. What do you think of his reaction
If there is any other way, the British do not want to use opium as a substitute for silver to continue the tea trade, because this thing itself is a double-edged sword. But there's no other way, China's agricultural economy is too resilient& mdash; Now we will talk about the third misconception of the questioner
Western cloth has advantages over earth cloth
Traditional Chinese; Men plow and women weave; Under the self-sufficient natural economy, a housewife in a rural household does not do any other farming work. Apart from basic household chores, she only sits at home day and night, using a textile machine to weave clothes. If she makes a set of clothes for her husband (including a shirt and pants, of course it must be linen, not silk), and the hemp is harvested from the field (which is also done by her husband), she starts to pound and process the hemp, and then turns it into a completely finished set of clothes that can be worn. She has to work hard day and night for a year and a half< Industrial production does have advantages, and in some places it may take a year and a half for farmers to make hemp clothes. However, with just a little mental effort, you can think of a problem, which is& hellip;
Since the Ming and Qing dynasties, there have been cotton fabrics
During the leisure time of agriculture in Songjiang Prefecture, tens of thousands of fabrics are produced daily. Using weaving to assist in farming is powerful for women's red. [4] I would like to emphasize again that the general public lacks a clear understanding of the scale effect of a unified agricultural empire. In the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, woven fabrics did not have a decisive advantage over industrial cotton fabrics, and even if you could control the price of cotton fabrics by long-distance sea transportation and industrial production to the port within a reasonable range, what would happen after they arrived at the port? Is there no shipping fee for transporting to the mainland? So in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Britain's fabric exports to China were only a few hundred thousand taels of silver, and it was really unrealistic to expect to use this to fill the tea deficit
In the 1770s, China experienced famine and the government encouraged the cultivation of grain, leading to an increase in demand for imported cotton. From 1775 to 1779, among the main imported goods in Guangzhou trade, the price of printed cotton was 288334 silver taels per year, surpassing the import price of British woolen fabrics for the first time (277671 silver taels per year), positioning it as the largest commodity exported from Britain to China. This situation continued until 1819. [5] It should be emphasized that tea and cotton cloth have always been major commodities in China's trade with Russia, and some people have imagined that; Tea is not important& ldquo; Earth cloth is far inferior to foreign cloth; Belonging to the spherical fantasy in vacuum. You should know that Sino Russian trade is really a long and arduous journey. To transport tea bricks, the tea needs to be transported from the production area to Zhangjiakou, and then from Zhangjiakou to Chaktu. The entire waterway transportation process is nearly 10000 kilometers, and it takes 4 months to travel on the road. Then the Russian caravan transports the tea back to Moscow from Chaktu. In 1798, the tea trade between China and Russia was approximately 1 30000 dan, reaching 54486 dan by 1839& mdash; As a comparison, in 1799, the East India Company imported approximately 157000 dan of tea from China. So without huge profits, would you be willing to travel thousands of miles and spend so much time on trade
These factors determined that Britain could only use opium to fill the gap in the trade deficit, and the East India Company initially held a cautious attitude towards the opium trade& mdash; Because normal people know that this kind of trade is not honorable. The problem is that there is really no other way to fill the trade deficit without selling opium, and India itself is quite suitable for growing opium, so since 1820, the opium shipped to China has been rolled over
Some people also fantasize about it; The opium trade was all dumped by the officials themselves due to the one port trade; It is even more absurd. Most of the opium trade was completed through smuggling, and the intricate and complex interests involved were astonishing. In order to avoid trouble, the East India Company adopted an opium monopoly system, selling refined opium through auctions. And then; Port vendors; They will capture opium and transport it to the sea near China. Afterwards, a large number of smugglers will consume this opium and secretly transport it to the mainland. In this process, they will& mdash; In the traditional sense, '; Anti Qing and Restoration of Ming Dynasty; The Triad and others will be responsible for escorting opium, while the large amount of silver needed in the trade process will be privately assisted by Shanxi ticket companies for turnover. And in order to make the government turn a blind eye, these people naturally have to show filial piety to the officials
After 1834, the privileges of the East India Company were abolished, leading to a rapid and uncontrolled expansion of the opium trade. From 1832 to 1838, the amount of opium imported into China doubled, which meant a massive outflow of silver. At that time, the Qing Dynasty had to use silver to pay taxes, and ordinary people used more copper coins for daily transactions. Therefore, the outflow of silver meant that silver was expensive and copper was cheap. One or two silver coins rose from exchanging 1000 copper coins to 1600 copper coins before the Opium War, which was equivalent to a 60% increase in tax burden for ordinary people without doing anything at home. For the British Empire, after doing business with China for so many years, they actually saw money coming back after the 19th century! Starting from the opium trade, silver has been transported back to Great Britain from the Far East. If you want to ban smoking here, how can I live in the British Empire
Go ahead, sir
Reference: Mou Anshi. Opium War [M]. Shanghai: Shanghai People's Publishing House, 1982. Andre Gunder Frank. Silver Capital: Valuing the East in Economic Globalization [M]. Central Compilation and Translation Press, 2000. Pritchard, E. H. (1970) The Critical Years of Early Anglo Chinese Relations, 1750-1800. United States: Octagon Books? Late Qing Dynasty Volume (Part One, Part Two) [M]. Social Sciences Literature Press, 2016