How China played a part in the birth of globalisation in the 16th century

Long before the greenback there was the Spanish “dollar” and long before New York and London, there was Mexico City. The discovery of a route across the Pacific in the 16th century was a catalyst for the integration of the planet. In a new book, The Silver Way: China, Spanish America and the Birth of Globalisation, 1565-1815 (Penguin Random House North Asia), Hong Kong International Literary Festival founder Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales, a former president of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce in the city, show how the Ruta de la Plata connected China with Spanish America, furthering economic and cultural exchange and building the foundations for the first global currency and the first “world city”.

What follows is an excerpt from the book.

EACH OF THE ELEMENTS THAT characterise globali­sation – global trade networks, shipping lines, integrated financial markets, flows of cultures and peoples – can be found in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. A global currency based on the Spanish “dollar” predated the US dollar’s similar role by two centuries. The attributes of today’s world cities typified Mexico 400 years ago.

Globalisation itself, therefore, evidently predates every­thing that conventional (Anglo-American) wisdom holds neces­sary for it: the Enlightenment, steam, free trade, laissez-faire capitalism, liberal political systems and the more recent, Western-initiated institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Whatever it is that sustains globalisation cannot be linked to this narrative, for the basic structures of globalisa­tion existed at least two centuries before any of these dev­elop­­ments took root.

Globalisation is a matter of degree, not a binary. But it was during the decidedly Spanish-dominated decades straddling the turn of the 16th century that humanity’s activities first reached a global scale.