Pirate treasure in popular fiction will usually include "pieces of eight", a phrase mimicked by Long John Silver's parrot in Robert Louis Stephenson's Treasure Island.
"Pieces of Eight" were silver! NOT gold!
They were to become the first global currency!
Pirates are now for dressing up, for fun, a staple of popular culture, especially for children.
Scary! But "fun" scary . . .
. . . lots of vicarious violence, and interactive!
The classic era of piracy in the Caribbean lasted from circa 1650 until the mid-1720s. By 1650, France, England and the United Provinces began to develop their colonial empires. This involved considerable seaborne trade, and a general economic improvement: there was money to be made—or stolen—and much of it travelled by ship. French buccaneers were established on northern Hispaniola as early as 1625, but lived at first mostly as hunters rather than robbers; their transition to full-time piracy was gradual and motivated in part by Spanish efforts to wipe out both the buccaneers and the prey animals on which they depended.
A drawing of Tortuga island from the 17th century.
The buccaneers' migration from Hispaniola's mainland to the more defensible offshore island of Tortuga limited their resources and accelerated their piratical raids. According to Alexandre Exquemelin, a buccaneer and historian who remains a major source on this period, the Tortuga buccaneer Pierre Le Grand pioneered the settlers' attacks on galleons making the return voyage to Spain.
The growth of buccaneering on Tortuga was augmented by the English capture of Jamaica from Spain in 1655. The early English governors of Jamaica freely granted letters of marque to Tortuga buccaneers and to their own countrymen, while the growth of Port Royal provided these raiders with a far more profitable and enjoyable place to sell their booty. In the 1660s, the new French governor of Tortuga, Bertrand d'Ogeron, similarly provided privateering commissions both to his own colonists and to English cutthroats from Port Royal. These conditions brought Caribbean buccaneering to its zenith.
Henry Every is shown selling his loot in this engraving by Howard Pyle. Every's capture of the Grand Mughal ship Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695 stands as one of the most profitable pirate raids ever perpetrated.
A new phase of piracy began in the 1690s as English pirates began to look beyond the Caribbean for treasure. The fall of Britain's Stuart kings had restored the traditional enmity between Britain and France, thus ending the profitable collaboration between English Jamaica and French Tortuga. The devastation of Port Royal by an earthquake in 1692 further reduced the Caribbean's attractions by destroying the pirates' chief market for fenced plunder. Caribbean colonial governors began to discard the traditional policy of "no peace beyond the Line," under which it was understood that war would continue (and thus letters of marque would be granted) in the Caribbean regardless of peace treaties signed in Europe; henceforth, commissions would be granted only in wartime, and their limitations would be strictly enforced. Furthermore, much of the Spanish Main had simply been exhausted; Maracaibo alone had been sacked three times between 1667 and 1678, while Río de la Hacha had been raided five times and Tolú eight.
At the same time, England's less favoured colonies, including Bermuda, New York, and Rhode Island, had become cash-starved by the Navigation Acts, which restricted trade with foreign ships. Merchants and governors eager for coin were willing to overlook and even underwrite pirate voyages; one colonial official defended a pirate because he thought it;
"very harsh to hang people that brings in gold to these provinces."Although some of these pirates operating out of New England and the Middle Colonies targeted Spain's remoter Pacific coast colonies well into the 1690s and beyond, the Indian Ocean was a richer and more tempting target. India's economic output was large during this time, especially in high-value luxury goods like silk and calico which made ideal pirate booty; at the same time, no powerful navies plied the Indian Ocean, leaving both local shipping and the various East India companies' vessels vulnerable to attack. This set the stage for the famous pirates, Thomas Tew, who pioneered the route which became known as the Pirate Round, Henry Every, Robert Culliford and William Kidd.
Between 1713 and 1714, a succession of peace treaties was signed which ended the War of the Spanish Succession. With the end of this conflict, thousands of seamen, including Britain's paramilitary privateers, were relieved of military duty. The result was a large number of trained, idle sailors at a time when the cross-Atlantic colonial shipping trade was beginning to boom. In addition, Europeans who had been pushed by unemployment to become sailors and soldiers involved in slaving were often enthusiastic to abandon that profession and turn to pirating, giving pirate captains for many years a constant pool of trained European recruits to be found in west African waters and coasts.
In 1715, pirates launched a major raid on Spanish divers trying to recover gold from a sunken treasure galleon near Florida. The nucleus of the pirate force was a group of English ex-privateers, all of whom would soon be enshrined in infamy: Henry Jennings, Charles Vane, Samuel Bellamy, and Edward England. The attack was successful, but contrary to their expectations, the governor of Jamaica refused to allow Jennings and their cohorts to spend their loot on his island. With Kingston and the declining Port Royal closed to them, Jennings and his comrades founded a new pirate base at Nassau, on the island of New Providence in the Bahamas, which had been abandoned during the war. Until the arrival of governor Woodes Rogers three years later, Nassau would be home for these pirates and their many recruits.
Shipping traffic between Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe began to soar in the 18th century, a model that was known as triangular trade, and was a rich target for piracy. Trade ships sailed from Europe to the African coast, trading manufactured goods and weapons in exchange for slaves. The traders would then sail to the Caribbean to sell the slaves, and return to Europe with goods such as sugar, tobacco and cocoa. Another triangular trade saw ships carry raw materials, preserved cod, and rum to Europe, where a portion of the cargo would be sold for manufactured goods, which (along with the remainder of the original load) were transported to the Caribbean, where they were exchanged for sugar and molasses, which (with some manufactured articles) were borne to New England. Ships in the triangular trade made money at each stop.
As part of the peace settlement of the War of the Spanish succession, Britain obtained the asiento, a Spanish government contract, to supply slaves to Spain's new world colonies, providing British traders and smugglers more access to the traditionally closed Spanish markets in America. This arrangement also contributed heavily to the spread of piracy across the western Atlantic at this time. Shipping to the colonies boomed simultaneously with the flood of skilled mariners after the war. Merchant shippers used the surplus of sailors' labour to drive wages down, cutting corners to maximize their profits, and creating unsavory conditions aboard their vessels.
Merchant sailors suffered from mortality rates as high or higher than the slaves being transported. Living conditions were so poor that many sailors began to prefer a freer existence as a pirate. The increased volume of shipping traffic also could sustain a large body of brigands preying upon it. Among the most infamous Caribbean pirates of the time were Edward Teach or Blackbeard, Calico Jack Rackham, and Bartholomew Roberts. Most of these pirates were eventually hunted down by the Royal Navy and killed or captured; several battles were fought between the brigands and the colonial powers on both land and sea.
Piracy in the Caribbean declined for the next several decades after 1730, but by the 1810s many pirates roamed the waters though they were not as bold or successful as their predecessors. The most successful pirates of the era were Jean Lafitte and Roberto Cofresi. Lafitte is considered by many to be the last buccaneer due to his army of pirates and fleet of pirate ships which held bases in and around the Gulf of Mexico. Lafitte and his men participated in the War of 1812 battle of New Orleans. Cofresi's base was in Mona Island, Puerto Rico, from where he disrupted the commerce throughout the region. He became the last major target of the international anti-piracy operations.
The elimination of piracy from European waters expanded to the Caribbean in the 18th century, West Africa and North America by the 1710s and by the 1720s even the Indian Ocean was a difficult location for pirates to operate. Piracy saw a brief resurgence between the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 and around 1720, as many unemployed seafarers took to piracy as a way to make ends meet when a surplus of sailors after the war led to a decline in wages and working conditions. At the same time, one of the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht that ended the war gave to Great Britain's Royal African Company and other British slavers a thirty-year asiento, or contract, to furnish African slaves to the Spanish colonies, providing British merchants and smugglers potential inroads into the traditionally closed Spanish markets in America and leading to an economic revival for the whole region. This revived Caribbean trade provided rich new pickings for a wave of piracy. Also contributing to the increase of Caribbean piracy at this time was Spain's breakup of the English logwood settlement at Campeche and the attractions of a freshly sunken silver fleet off the southern Bahamas in 1715. Fears over the rising levels of crime and piracy, political discontent, concern over crowd behaviour at public punishments, and an increased determination by parliament to suppress piracy, resulted in the Piracy Act of 1717 and of 1721. These established a seven-year penal transportation to North America as a possible punishment for those convicted of lesser felonies, or as a possible sentence that capital punishment might be commuted to by royal pardon.
After 1720, piracy in the classic sense became extremely rare as increasingly effective anti-piracy measures were taken by the Royal Navy making it impossible for any pirate to pursue an effective career for long. By 1718, the British Royal Navy had approximately 124 vessels and 214 by 1815; a big increase from the two vessels England had possessed in 1670. British Royal Navy warships tirelessly hunted down pirate vessels, and almost always won these engagements.
Piracy on the Spanish main was provoked by the lure of silver on the Spanish Manila Galleons and Treasure Fleet along the trade routes from Manila to Acapulco across the Pacific and from Mexico to Spain across the Atlantic.
The Silver Way
This is an example of a Spanish dollar, also known as the piece of eight or the peso. It is a silver coin, of approximately 38 mm diameter, worth eight Spanish reales, and that was minted in the Spanish Empire following a monetary reform in 1497.
This particular coin also shows Chinese marks, known as "chop Marks". This leads us to the story of how the Spanish dollar became widely used by many countries as the first international/world currency because of its uniformity in standard and milling characteristics. Some countries countersigned the Spanish dollar so it could be used as their local currency.
The Spanish dollar was the coin upon which the original United States dollar was based, and it remained legal tender in the United States until the Coinage Act of 1857. Because it was widely used in Europe, the Americas, and the Far East, it became the first world currency by the late 18th century. Aside from the U.S. dollar, several other currencies, such as the Canadian dollar, the Japanese yen, the Chinese yuan, the Philippine peso, and several currencies in the rest of the Americas, were initially based on the Spanish dollar and other 8-real coins.
Diverse theories link the origin of the "$" symbol to the columns and stripes that appear on one side of the Spanish dollar. The hypothesis holds that the sign derives from the symbolic representation of the Pillars of Hercules. This representation can have either a banner separately around each pillar, or, as in the Spanish coat of arms, a banner curling between them.
In 1492, Ferdinand II of Aragon adopted the symbol of the Pillars of Hercules and added the Latin warning Non plus ultra meaning "nothing further beyond", indicating "this is the end of the (known) world". But when Christopher Columbus came to America, the legend was changed to Plus ultra, meaning "further beyond". The Pillars of Hercules wrapped in a banner thus became a symbol of the New World. The link between this symbol and the dollar sign is more clearly seen in Spanish coins of the period, which show two pillars, each with a separate banner, rather than one banner spanning both pillars. In this example the right-hand pillar resembles the dollar sign, and additionally directly relates to the use of money.
According to this theory, traders wrote signs that, instead of saying "Spanish dollar" (piece of eight, real de a ocho in Spanish or peso duro), had this symbol made by hand, and this in turn evolved into a simple S with two vertical bars. When the United States gained their independence from Great Britain, they created the US dollar, but in its early decades they continued to use the Spanish dollar, which was more trusted in all markets.
The discovery of an ocean by Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa in 1513 after his expedition crossed the Isthmus of Panama and reached a new ocean that he named Mar del Sur (literally, "Sea of the South" or "South Sea") because the ocean was to the south of the coast of the isthmus where he first observed this ocean horizon.
This discovery would open up the possibility of a trade route to the East Indies for the Spanish Empire across this sea, a sea that was then, by treaty, to become a "closed sea", a maritime domain. As an extension of the lands of the Spanish main, this Spanish ocean domain stretched west across the globe to the antimeridian that passes through the East Indies of South East Asia, and agreed in the 1529 Treaty of Zaragoza between Spain and Portugal.
European colonization began in earnest when Spanish explorer Miguel López de Legazpi arrived from Mexico in 1565 and formed the first European settlements in Cebu. Beginning with just five ships and five hundred men accompanied by Augustinian monks, and further strengthened in 1567 by two hundred soldiers, he was able to repel the Portuguese and create the foundations for the colonization of the Archipelago. In 1571, the Spanish, their Latin-American recruits and their Filipino (Visayan) allies, commanded by able conquistadors such as Mexico-born Juan de Salcedo (who was in love with Tondo's princess, Kandarapa) attacked the Maynila, a vassal-state of the Brunei Sultanate and liberated plus incorporated the kingdom of Tondo as well as establishing Manila as the capital of the Spanish East Indies.
It was the Manila Galleons (Spanish: Galeón de Manila) that were instrumental in making global trade a reality. These were the Spanish trading ships which for two and a half centuries linked the Philippines with Mexico across the Pacific Ocean, making one or two round-trip voyages per year between the ports of Acapulco and Manila, which were both part of New Spain. The name of the galleon changed to reflect the city that the ship sailed from, and the term Manila Galleons is also used to refer to the trade route itself between Acapulco and Manila, which lasted from 1565 to 1815.
The Manila Galleons were also known in New Spain as "La Nao de la China" (The China Ship) because it carried largely Chinese goods, shipped from Manila.
The Manila Galleon trade route was inaugurated in 1565 after Augustinian friar and navigator Andrés de Urdaneta discovered the tornaviaje or return route from the Philippines to Mexico. The first successful round trips were made by Urdaneta and by Alonso de Arellano that year. China, Spanish America and the Birth of Globalisation, 1565–1815
The route lasted until 1815 when the Mexican War of Independence broke out. The Manila galleons sailed the Pacific for 250 years, bringing to the Americas cargoes of luxury goods such as spices and porcelain, in exchange for silver. The route also created a cultural exchange that shaped the identities and culture of the countries involved. The Manila-Acapulco galleon trade finally began when Spanish navigators Alonso de Arellano and Andrés de Urdaneta discovered the eastward return route in 1565. They were given the task of finding a return route. Reasoning that the trade winds of the Pacific might move in a gyre as the Atlantic winds did, they had to sail north to the 38th parallel north, off the east coast of Japan, before catching the eastward-blowing winds ("westerlies") that would take them back across the Pacific.
Trade with Ming China via Manila served a major source of revenue for the Spanish Empire and as a fundamental source of income for Spanish colonists in the Philippine Islands. Until 1593, two or more ships would set sail annually from each port. The Manila trade became so lucrative that Seville merchants petitioned king Philip II of Spain to protect the monopoly of the Casa de Contratación based in Seville. This led to the passing of a decree in 1593 that set a limit of two ships sailing each year from either port, with one kept in reserve in Acapulco and one in Manila. An "armada" or armed escort of galleons, was also approved. Due to official attempts at controlling the galleon trade, contraband and understating of ships' cargo became widespread.
Between 1609 and 1616, 9 galleons and 6 galleys were constructed in Philippine shipyards. The average cost was 78,000 pesos per galleon and using timber from approximately 2,000 trees.
"From 1729 to 1739, the main purpose of the Cavite shipyard was the construction and outfitting of the galleons for the Manila to Acapulco trade run."Due to the route's high profitability but long voyage time, it was essential to build the largest possible galleons, which were the largest class of ships known to have been built. In the 16th century, they averaged from 1,700 to 2,000 tons, were built of Philippine hardwoods and could carry 300 - 500 passengers.
The galleon trade was supplied by merchants largely from port areas of Fujian who traveled to Manila to sell the Spaniards spices, porcelain, ivory, lacquerware, processed silk cloth and other valuable commodities. Galleons transported the goods to be sold in the Americas, namely in New Spain and Peru as well as in European markets. East Asia trading primarily functioned on a silver standard due to Ming China's use of silver ingots as a medium of exchange.
As such, goods were mostly bought by silver mined from Mexico and Potosí. The cargoes arrived in Acapulco and were transported by land across Mexico to the port of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, where they were loaded onto the Spanish treasure fleet bound for Spain.
It took at least four months to sail across the Pacific Ocean from Manila to Acapulco, and the galleons were the main link between the Philippines and the viceregal capital at Mexico City and thence to Spain itself. Many of the so-called "Kastilas" or Spaniards in the Philippines were actually of Mexican descent, and the Hispanic culture of the Philippines is somewhat close to Mexican culture. Even after the galleon era, and at the time when Mexico finally gained its independence, the two nations still continued to trade, except for a brief lull during the Spanish–American War.
Places along the trade routes from Acapulco to Manila on this map by George Anson, 1751.When Miguel López de Legazpi’s expedition departed Mexico in 1564 with four ships across the Pacific to claim Guam and the Philippines for King Philip II of Spain, only one ship would return homeward from Manila, the San Pablo. Under the command of Legazpi’s grandson, Felipe de Salcedo, and navigated by Andrés de Urdaneta, the San Pablo was the first Spanish galleon to successfully return from Manila across the Pacific carrying mainly spices in 1565, thus beginning the 250-year long galleon trade.
The Manila Galleon Trade Route was an economically powerful system of linking Spain with the commodities of Asia via Mexico. It consisted of two separate routes — westward from Acapulco to Manila and eastward on the return, following two separate belts of trade winds across the Pacific.
The westward route to the Philippines from Acapulco began in February or March between 10-15 degrees latitude, where the belt of the northeasterly trade winds would rapidly take the galleons across the Pacific with infrequent storms. The westward route could take ships as far north as 30 degrees, but at above 13 degrees, they would pass through Guam and the Mariana Islands. A royal order in 1668 required that the Acapulco galleons made Guam a port of call with the establishment of the Roman Catholic mission established by Jesuit priest Father Diego Luis de San Vitores. The galleons carried supplies and the situado (subsidy) from Mexico for the governor, Jesuit mission, and colonial management, while trading metal objects, cloth and other items for water, fruit and other fresh provisions with the Chamorro people. These transactions mostly took place just outside the reef because Guam’s waters were too shallow. Having sailed for approximately sixty days from Mexico, the galleons had another month of travel before reaching the Philippines.
While the westward passage across the Pacific from Acapulco was generally considered easy, the difficulties traveling eastward on the return began with the simple leaving of Manila. The eastern route took the ship from Manila to the waters off Taiwan and Japan, then across to California and down the coast to Acapulco. Galleons had to pass through the Strait of San Bernardino, usually in June since it was considered the best time of year, and the passage out of the Philippine archipelago could take two to four weeks to clear before reaching the open sea. Of the thirty galleons that were lost in the entire history of the Manila Galleon Trade, many were lost during the treacherous navigation out of the Philippines around rocks and islands, and through channels with dangerous currents and storms.
Once clear of the strait, the galleon would follow closely the route established by Urdaneta in the first San Pedro voyage (1565) with little variation. Galleons travelled between 30-45 degrees latitude in the belt of the westerly winds, passing Japan, and then were without sight of land for several months until the coast of California. The first San Pablo galleon made landfall at San Miguel, one of the Santa Barbara islands near Los Angeles. Later galleons would demarcate their position along the upper California coast at Cape Mendocino, Point Reyes, the Farallon Islands, Point Pinos and through the Santa Barbara Channel along the lower California coast. Navigators were anxious to keep their distance from land and were constantly mindful of treacherous rocks, islands and fog.
After months of travel, the galleons might stop at the mission of San José del Cabo on the Baja California peninsula, or at Navidad on the Guadalajara coast for water and provisions. Nearly out of supplies, commander Gerónimo Monteiro in 1734 stopped at the Bay of Bernabé and the San José del Cabo mission and took on sheep, hogs, cattle and game birds, as well as fruits and vegetables. It was not until the latter part of the 18th century when the coast of California was becoming more colonized that the galleons would stop at San Francisco, Monterey, and Santa Barbara. Other times, a galleon would not touch land at all since leaving the Philippines until arrival at the port of Acapulco. The dangerous and often fatal eastward passage from the Philippines would take no less than five to six months, although some galleons were surprisingly able to make the eastward crossing in less time.
Due to a royal law of 1593, the galleons were technically restricted to 300 tons in weight, yet one galleon weighed as much as 2,000 tons before setting off from the Philippines. Actually, 1,500 tons was most usually the average galleon weight. Most galleons were built in the Philippines; coming from Cebu, the ships might carry gold, silk, ivory, sandalwood, copper, porcelain, musk, camphor, spices and other products from China and Japan. Much of the cargo on the galleons were illegal and smuggled by the ship’s commander and junior officers, which gave them immense profits above their normal pay. On the return from Mexico, the galleons would be filled with silver in the form of coins and bullion as well as gems, lace, drugs and other items from Mexico and Spain.
Commanding officers and their troops of soldiers were sent westward from Mexico to fill garrisons in the Philippines, Guam and the Moluccas (island archipelago in Indonesia) and were the most numerous passengers alongside priests and new administrators to replace the old administrators making their voyage eastward back to Mexico and Spain. While the ships’ commanding officers were usually Spanish, the majority of the galleon crews was Malaysian and Filipino who were underpaid in comparison to their Spanish counterparts. Slaves, including Chamorros from the Marianas, were also carried along the trade route from either direction.
The last galleon from Manila arrived in Acapulco in 1811, and the galleon Magellan was the last to sail from Acapulco for Manila in 1815. The Mexican War of Independence ended Spanish control of Mexico and with it, the Manila Galleon trade and the annual port of call of galleon ships in the Marianas on their way to the Philippines.
From Guampedia - Article by Leiana S. A. Naholowa’a
In 2014, the idea to nominate the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade Route was initiated by the Mexican ambassador to UNESCO with the Filipino ambassador to UNESCO.
An Experts' Roundtable Meeting was held at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) on April 23, 2015 as part of the preparation of the Philippines for the possible transnational nomination of the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade Route to the World Heritage List. The nomination will be made jointly with Mexico. The papers presented and discussed during the roundtable establish the route's Outstanding Universal Value.
The Mexican side reiterated that they will also follow suit with the preparations for the route's nomination.
Spain has also backed the nomination of the route in the World Heritage List and has also suggested the archives related to the route under the possession of the Philippines, Mexico, and Spain to be nominated as part of another UNESCO list, the Memory of the World Register.
In 2017, the Philippines established the Manila-Acapulco Galleon Museum in Metro Manila, one of the necessary steps in nominating the trade route to UNESCO.
Manila -
'the world's first global city'
In Peter Frankopan's book The Silk Roads - A New History of the World, the chapter 'The Road of Silver' sets out the way this trading route transformed world trade. China is ever present in this narrative, as are the multiple routes and connections that have shaped the modern world. The Spanish city of Manila was founded on June 24, 1571, by Spanish conquistador Miguel López de Legazpi, and is regarded as the city's official founding date.
Frankopan writes:
In 1571, the foundation of Manila by the Spanish changed the rhythm of global trade; for a start it followed a programme of colonisation whose character was markedly less destructive for the local population than had been the case after the first Atlantic crossings. Originally established as a base from which to acquire spices, the settlement quickly became a major metropolis and an important connection point between Asia and the Americas. Goods now began to move across the Pacific without passing through Europe first, as did the silver to pay for them. Manila became an emporium where a rich array of goods could be bought.
(pages 239-240)Manila was, in the words of one modern commentator, 'the world's first global city'.The amount of silver heading from the Americas through the Philippines and on into the rest of Asia was staggering: at east as much passed this way as it did through Europe in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, causing alarm in some quarters in Spain as remittances from the New World began to fall.
The silver road was strung round the world like a belt. The precious metal ended up in one place in particular: China. It did so for two reasons. First, China's size and sophistication made it a major producer of luxury goods, including the ceramics and porcelain that were so desirable in Europe that a huge counterfeit market quickly grew up. The Chinese, wrote Matteo Ricci while visiting Nanjing, 'are greatly given to forging antique things, with great artifice and ingenuity', and generating large profits thanks to their skill.
China was able to supply the export market in volume and to step up production accordingly.
The second reason why so much money flowed into China was an imbalance in the relationship between precious metals. In China, silver's value hovered around an approximate ratio to gold of 6:1, significantly higher than in India, Persia or the Ottoman Empire; its value was almost double its pricing in Europe in the early sixteenth century. In practice, this meant that European money bought more in Chinese markets and from Chinese traders than it did elsewhere - which in turn provided a powerful incentive to buy Chinese. The opportunities for currency trading and taking advantage of these imbalances in what modern bankers call arbitrage were grasped immediately by new arrivals to the Far East - especially those who recognised that the unequal value of gold in China and Japan produced easy profits.(pages 240-241)
The so-called "chop marks" on this Mexican Dollar were made in China.
The Manila galleons transported Mexican silver to Manila in the Spanish Philippines, where it would be exchanged for Philippine and Chinese goods, since silver was the only foreign commodity China would accept. In Oriental trade, Spanish dollars were often stamped with Chinese characters known as "chop marks" which indicated that particular coin had been assayed by a well-known merchant and determined to be genuine. The specifications of the Spanish dollar became a standard for trade in the Far East, with later Western powers issuing trade dollars, and colonial currencies such as the Hong Kong dollar, to the same specifications.
The first Chinese yuan coins had the same specification as a Spanish dollar, leading to a continuing equivalence in some respects between the names "yuan" and "dollar" in the Chinese language. Other currencies also derived from the dollar include the Japanese yen, Korean won, Philippine peso and the Malaysian ringgit.
Etymology of "dollar"
In the 16th century, Count Hieronymus Schlick of Bohemia began minting a coin known as a Joachimsthaler (from German thal, modern spelling Tal, "valley", cognate with "dale" in English), named for Joachimsthal, the valley in the Ore Mountains where the silver was mined (St. Joachim's Valley, then part of the Kingdom of Bohemia within the Holy Roman Empire, now Jáchymov, part of the Czech Republic).[7] Joachimstaler was later shortened to taler, a word that eventually found its way into Norwegian, Danish and Swedish as daler, Russian as талер (táler), Czech and Slovene as tolar, Polish as talar, Dutch as daalder, Amharic as ታላሪ (talari), Hungarian as tallér, Italian as tallero, Greek as τάληρο (taliro), Spanish tálero and English as dollar.[7]
The Joachimsthaler weighed 451 Troy grains (29.2 g) of silver. So successful were these coins that similar thalers were minted in Burgundy and France. The Burgundian Cross Thaler depicted the Cross of Burgundy and was prevalent in the Burgundian Netherlands that were revolting against the Spanish king and Duke of Burgundy Philip II. After 1575, the Dutch revolting provinces replaced the currency with a daalder depicting a lion, hence its Dutch name leeuwendaalder.
Specifically to facilitate export trade, the leeuwendaalder was authorized to contain 427.16 grains of .750 fine silver, lighter than the large denomination coins then in circulation. Clearly it was more advantageous for a Dutch merchant to pay a foreign debt in leeuwendaalders rather than in other heavier, more costly coins. Thus, the leeuwendaalder or lion dollar became the coin of choice for foreign trade. It became popular in the Middle East, and colonies in the east and west.
They also circulated throughout the English colonies during the 17th and early 18th centuries. From New Netherland (New York) the lion dollar spread to all thirteen colonies in the west. English speakers began to apply the word "dollar" also to the Spanish peso or "piece of eight" by 1581, which was also widely used in the British North American colonies at the time of the American Revolution, hence adopted as the name and weight of the US monetary unit in the late 18th century.
Update
In the chapter 'Cheap Money' of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things - A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel (see Guardian Review), they look at this particular history of exchange:
"Once again we can see cheapness at work. Cheap lives turned into cheap workers dependent on cheap care and cheap food in home communities, requiring cheap fuel to collect and process cheap nature to produce cheap money - and quite a lot of it. Potosi was the single most important silver source in the New World, and New World silver constituted 74 percent of the world's sixteenth century silver production. Silver does not make trade, but global trade can be traced from the mines of Potosi. Unless it forms parts of circuits of exchange, silver is just shiny dirt. It's the fusion of commodity production and exchange that turns it into capital. That's why some commentators have suggested that the birth year of global trade was 1571, when the city of Manila was founded. Silver from the New world didn't stay in Europe but was propelled along the spice routes and later across the Pacific. Japanese silver flowed to China from 1540 to 1620 as part of a complex network of exchange and arbitrage. Without the connection of exchange of silver for Asian commodities, money couldn't flow from the New World into East Asia. Because the Portuguese and then the Dutch controlled maritime silver flows through Europe to Asia, the Spanish short-circuited them, annually sending as much silver (fifty tons) across the Pacific and through Manila as they did across the Atlantic through Seville. Similar volumes of silver found their way to the Baltic. In eastern Europe, silver combined with credit, quasi-feudal landlords, and enserfed labor to deliver cheap timber, food, and vital raw materials to the Dutch Republic.
To remember this is to insist that, although Europe features in it, capitalism's story isn't a Eurocentric one. The rise of capitalism integrated life and power from Potosi to Manila, from Goa to Amsterdam."(pages 84-85)
Potosí lies at the foot of the Cerro de Potosí—sometimes referred to as the Cerro Rico ("rich mountain") — a mountain popularly conceived of as being "made of" silver ore that dominates the city. The Cerro Rico is the reason for Potosí's historical importance, since it was the major supply of silver for Spain during the period of the New World Spanish Empire.
A China crisis?
Picking up again from Peter Frankopan's book The Silk Roads - A New History of the World, and the chapter 'The Road of Silver' sets out the way globalisation was no less problematic five centuries ago than it is today:
"Maps like the Selden Map, recently rediscovered in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, likewise demostrate the increasing Chinese interest in trade and travel in this period, offering an extensive overview of South-East Asia, complete with shipping routes. however, these are something of an exception: in this period, as before, Chinese maps typically retained a cloistered view of the world, with visual representations bounded to the north by the Great Wall and to the east by the sea. This was symptomatic of China's readiness to play a passive role at a time when the world was opening up; but it also reflected European naval superiority in East Asia where Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese vessels targeted each other - but also regularly seized Chinese junks and their cargoes too.China was not keen to take part in running battles between aggressive rivals, let alone to be made to suffer as a result; in the circumstances, the inclination to become increasingly introspective, but at the same time reap the benefit of traders coming to them, seemed entirely logical."
"Much of the silver that flooded into China was spent in a series of major reforms, not the least of which were the monetisation of the economy, the encouragement of free labour markets and a deliberate programme to stimulate foreign trade. Ironically, China's love of silver and the premium it placed on this particular precious metal became its Achilles heel. With such great quantities of silver reaching China, above all through Manila, it was inevitable that its value would start to fall, which over time caused price inflation. The net result was that the value of silver and above all its value in relation to gold, was forced into line with other regions and continents. Unlike India, where the impact of the opening up of the world produced new wonders of the world, in China it was to lead to a serious economic and political crisis in the seventeenth century.
Globalisation was no less problematic five centuries ago than it is today."(pages 241-242)
