Скачать или смотреть Financial History Network. Dan Du seminar

“Green Gold and Paper Gold: Credit Instruments in the Chinese-American Tea Trade, 1784-1842.” by Dan Du, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Chair: Manuel A. Bautista-González, Columbia University
Dr. Du is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is currently working on her first book project, titled This World in a Teacup: Chinese-American Tea Trade in the Nineteenth Century. Growing out of the research on the tea trade, her other projects examine tea consumption in the post-Revolutionary United States and the credit instruments employed in pre-modern Asian trade.

The project examines the credit instruments employed in the Chinese-American tea trade and how they helped to trigger the first Anglo-Chinese Opium War. While the China trade has been depicted as a hard-money system, the research highlights the critical role of promissory notes and bills of exchange in facilitating the tea trade between Chinese and American merchants. Moreover, the rise of opium smuggling to China produced a secondary monetary market in Asia, where American traders sold their bills–generated in the trans-Atlantic cotton trade or issued by the Bank of the United States–and reduced silver shipments to China. With Americans being the primary provider of South American silver to China in the nineteenth century, the structural change in the U.S. export, inflated American economy, aggravated the silver drain on China, and prompted Chinese government’s crackdown on opium, thus paving another stepping stone for the First Opium War in 1839.