Financial History Webinar – September 28, 2020 – Dan Du

September 28, 2020

5 pm Frankfurt / 4 pm London / 12 pm Sao Paulo / 11 am New York / 10 am Mexico City/Bogota

“Green Gold and Paper Gold: Credit Instruments in the Chinese-American Tea Trade, 1784-1842.”

Dan Du, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte (United States)

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.