ReORIENT

"Andre Gunder Frank’s book takes a more or less bird’s-eye view over the world from outer space. He follows the flow of monetary silver after the Great Discovery [of silver in America]. Frank realised that all the dispensable silver flew from the Spanish New World and Europe in one-way traffic to Asia, mainly to China, for some three centuries. Consequently, the world accepted a single form of money – silver. Frank thus believed that silver was the key to the establishment and understanding of globalisation. Given that the world did not see the metal again until China re-exported it to buy opium, Western goods and war reparations, mainly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, China acted as the ‘end market’ for global silver flow. In this way, China became the engine, although passively, of the first episode of globalisation. The importance of Frank’s book is to show that there was interdependence between Europe and Asia and that China was not a closed economy or an economy irrelevant to Europe. Such a view is highly compatible with Pomeranz’s. This book contains a chart of the world’s silver flows, bearing the larger than life message that any downplay of the importance of Asia in the history of our world in the past 500 years is no longer acceptable."