Arturo Giraldez - Böcker

This groundbreaking book presents the first full history of the Manila galleons, which marked the true beginning of a global economy. Arturo Giraldez, the world’s leading scholar of the galleons, traces the rise of the maritime route, which began with the founding of the city of Manila in 1571 and ended in 1815 when the last galleon left the port of Acapulco in New Spain (Mexico) for the Philippines, establishing a permanent connection between the Spanish empire in America with Asian countries, most importantly China, the main supplier of commodities during that era. Throughout the two-and-a-half-century history of the Manila galleons, the strategic commodity fuelling global networks was always silver. Giraldez shows how this most important of precious metals shaped world history, with influences that stretch to the present.

World history conventionally ignores or underestimates the importance of Manila, the Manila galleons, and the Philippines as key stages in the development of trans-Pacific contact and of the world economy. Essays in this volume discuss Philippine-Asian exchanges prior to the entry of Europeans, and then look at European influences and the impact of Magellan’s voyage, and the emergence of Manila as one of global trade’s crucial linchpins during four centuries. Linkages between Latin America and China, and Spanish-Japanese competition for the Chinese marketplace are important topics. Tensions and cooperation among Chinese, Japanese, Iberians, Africans, Christians, Muslims and others on Philippine soil are also covered. This volume suggests the need for thorough re-evaluation of the Philippines’ central role in terms of both Pacific history and global history as perhaps the single most important stage in the traffic that linked China and Latin America.

Including 11 essays published over the last 15 years, this volume by Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez concerns the origins and early development of globalization. It opens with their 1995 "Silver Spoon" essay and a theoretical essay published in 2002. Subsequent sections deal with Pacific Ocean exchanges, interconnections between the Spanish, Ottoman, Japanese and Chinese empires, and the necessity of multidisciplinary approaches to global history. The volume follows the evolution of the authors' thinking concerning the central role of China in the global silver trade, as well as interrelations among silver and non-silver markets. Research before 2002 paved the way for development of a coherent 'Birth of Globalization' narrative that portrays economic factors in the context of powerful epidemiological, ecological, demographic, and cultural forces. In the final essay Flynn and Giráldez argue for incorporating the work of all academic disciplines when attempting to understand the history of globalization, advocating an inclusive historical data base which recognizes contextual realities and an inductive process of reasoning.

The literature on early-modern monetary history is vast and rich, yet overly Eurocentric. This book takes a global approach. It calls attention to the fact that, for example, Japan and South America were dominant in silver production, while China was the principal end-market; key areas for transshipment included Europe and Africa, India and the Middle East. Europeans were often just middlemen. Other monetized substances - gold, copper and cowries - must also be viewed globally. The interrelated trades in metals and monies are what first linked worldwide markets, and disequilibrium within the silver market in the 16th and 17th centuries was an active cause of this global trade.

This title was first published in 2002.In recent years scholars have begun to conceptualize the history of the Pacific Ocean as a subset of world history. This question is taken up in the introductory chapter of this volume, which sets out four periods of modern Pacific history: a silver period, 1570s-1750; a period of early integration, 1750-1850; a gold period, 1850-c.1900; and a period of imperial strategies after the gold rushes. The next chapter looks at the fur trade of the Pacific coast of America, and its dependence on markets in China and Russia, followed by a set which focus on the era of the gold rushes, in California, Australia and New Zealand, when the pace of Pacific integration grew rapidly and new markets opened across the ocean. The last chapters examine aspects of the subsequent evolution of the Pacific Ocean into an ’American lake’, looking in particular at the interlocking of politics and migration. This volume carries forward study of the ’Pacific Centuries’, promoting the conceptualization of the Pacific Ocean as a coherent unit of analysis, and providing further important steps toward provision of the multi-century framework that is required for proper understanding of today’s ’Pacific Century’.