Silk

Silk, a Chinese invention, was one of the world's first global commodities due to its high value per weight and the ease with which it could be carried, stored, and packed. Its production involved three main stages: seri-culture (the cultivation of mulberry trees and the rearing of silkworms), silk reeling, and weaving. International trade in silk was most intense in raw silk, the product of the second stage. The more differentiated woven silk often was better supplied by local producers, and trade in cocoons, especially across long distances, was very limited.

The 3,000-year history of the silk trade started with the Silk Road, the famous overland route that traversed the heartland of the Eurasian continent, through which the Chinese secrets of silk production were gradually diffused. By the mid-fifteenth century, silk production had already become a worldwide phenomenon.

The sea route for silk trade, which led from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean, then through either the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, became increasingly important after the turn of the first millennium with the shifting dominance of Muslim and Chinese traders. The most spectacular display of Chinese maritime supremacy was the grandiose expedition led by the Ming dynasty's Muslim eunuch Zheng Ho from 1400 to 1431; his sea-going junks reached Borneo, the Philippines, Ceylon, Malabar, and even East Africa. The rather abrupt withdrawal of the Ming naval presence in the Pacific waters opened the way for the arrival of the first European power, Portugal, whose ships by 1488 had found their way to East Asia by bypassing the mighty Ottoman barrier and rounding the Cape of Good Hope.

However, the initial intrusion of European navigation into the Pacific had little effect on the pattern of the world silk trade. Europe by then received its raw silk supply chiefly from Persia, largely through the overland route. Furthermore, raw silk production had also taken firm root in Southern Europe beginning in the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries France and later Italy had become the world leaders in high-quality raw silk production. Europeans did continue to look eastward for raw silk supply—for diversification, and mostly for a cheaper and lower grade of raw silk. In the early seventeenth century the British East India Company succeeded in partially diverting the raw silk exports of Persia from the caravan route to the sea route. After the mid-seventeenth century they also started using large-scale imports of raw silk from Bengal, followed in the next two centuries by Chinese raw silk through the Chinese government's restricted foreign trade port cities.

European traders also played an active role in the intermediary trade in East Asia. In the 1530s Ming China ended its century-long official tribute trade with Japan because of unresolved disputes, and also banned private trade. Using Macau, a base they seized from China in 1557, Portuguese traders launched the so-called triangular trade of Nagasaki–Macau–Canton that illicitly exchanged Japanese silver for Chinese silk. In the early seventeenth century Dutch as well as private Chinese merchants took over this transit trade, using Taiwan as an intermediary base. This transit trade started to decline towards the end of the eighteenth century as Japanese domestic raw silk production began to grow following Tokugawa Japan's 1685 import restrictions on Chinese silk.

Meanwhile, Chinese silk was gaining new ground across the Pacific in the newly colonized South and Central American markets. In 1530 Spaniards successfully introduced sericulture and silk industry into Mexico, a sector that turned out to be short-lived. As Europeans continued westward and opened the Pacific for trade, the young Mexican silk industry confronted direct competition from the Chinese industry. The Canton–Manila–Acapulco triangular trade of silver for silks between China and New Spain can be seen as a Pacific extension of the concurrent Nagasaki–Macau–Canton silver for silks exchange intermediated by the Portuguese and later the Dutch.

China's huge demand for silver resulted mainly from the Ming government's conversion to a silver standard, which provided significant arbitrage possibilities because of the gold/silver ratio discrepancies between Asia and Europe. China became a huge "suction pump," drawing silver first from Japan, then from Mexico and Peru. According to conservative estimates, fully 75 percent of the 400 million pesos of silver bound for the Philippines from 1565 to 1820 ended up in China. Chinese silk was the single most important export item to both Japan and Spanish America. In the high stage of the trade, China sent 3 or even 4 million pesos worth of silk goods a year to New Spain.

Chinese silk not only demolished nascent Mexican sericulture and severely affected the young weaving industry there, but also effectively drove out the Spanish silk products in Spanish America. The burgeoning exports of raw silk also greatly stimulated the commercialization and specialization of the Chinese economy. In particular, important silk producing, financing, and trading towns arose in the coastal regions of Ming and Qing China. The Manila–Acapulco–Canton trade waned towards the early nineteenth century after the independence of Mexico.

The evolution of a single global market started with the British engagement in the Opium War from 1839 to 1842, which forcibly opened China to foreign trade through the treaty-port system. By 1845 Chinese raw silk exports reached close to 2 million pounds. By the 1850s Japan under the treaty-port system rose to become another important raw silk exporter, following more than a century and half of successful import-substitution experience. In the first half of the nineteenth century London was an important center for global silk trade.

During the 1850s and 1860s a silkworm disease called pebrine broke out in Southern Europe and gradually spread to the Middle East. In its worst years, the seri-cultural crop in Europe declined by as much as 75 percent. At this critical juncture the British silk connection at the other end of the Eurasian continent rose to crucial importance. Between 1850 and 1860 Chinese and Japanese exports to Britain roughly quadrupled. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, French silk merchants began to import directly from China and Japan. Between the 1880s and the 1930s more than half of the raw silk used on the looms in Lyon, the world's silk weaving capital, came from East Asia. Marseilles, Lyon, and later Milan supplanted London and emerged as the world's most important trade centers of raw silk in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The mid-nineteenth century also marked the beginning of the massive diffusion of French and Italian mechanized silk-reeling technology around the world, particularly to East Asia.

By the twentieth century the U.S. silk-weaving industry, initially started off behind a postbellum tariff wall, had grown to become the world's largest. In the 1920s and 1930s the production of the U.S. silk industry exceeded that of all European countries combined. The highly mechanized, large-scale nature of the U.S. silk manufacture placed exacting demands on the quality of imported raw silk, a challenge that was most successfully met by the Japanese raw silk producers. By the mid-1910s Japan, overtaking China, became the world's largest raw silk exporter. By the 1920s and 1930s Japan supplied 75 to 90 percent of the world's total raw silk exports. By then, the bulk of the global silk trade was carried over the Pacific.

Global silk trade was dealt a devastating blow by the onset of the 1930s Great Depression. But the more lasting damage came from the rise of synthetic fibers—rayon and nylon—which could be produced at a fraction of the cost of raw silk. In the post–World War II era, silk trade and industry worldwide lost ground. In traditional centers of production such as Japan and Italy this labor-intensive industry completely disappeared during the last decades of the twentieth century, but they continued to remain important in China, India, and Central Asia, as well as in rising areas of production such as Brazil.

SEE ALSO Agriculture; Bengal; China; Colbert, Jean-Baptiste; Cotton; East India Company, British; East India Company, Dutch; East India Company, Other; Empire, British; Empire, French; Empire, Japanese; Empire, Mughal; Empire, Ottoman; Empire, Qing; Guangzhou; Imperialism; Import Substitution; India; Industrialization;Laborers, Coerced;Laborers, Contract;Levant Company;Madras;Manchuria;Mercantilism;Mexico;New York;Pakistan;Pasha, Isma?il;Peru;Protection Costs;Slavery and the African Slave Trade;Textiles;United Kingdom;United States;Wool.

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Debin Ma