Reference: MA, Debin. “The Great Silk Exchange: How the World ...

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The era started with the British engagement in the Opium War from 1839 to 1842 which forcibly opened China to foreign trade with the establishment of the treaty ports, where traded commodities could enter and leave free from any restriction or tariff. After a sharp decline during the war period (1838-42), Chinese silk exports recovered and reached close to two million pounds in 1845 (Shih 1976: 111; Fan and Wen 1993: 291). The treaty port system was extended to Japan in 1858. The Japanese raw silk industry, with more than a century and half of successful import substitution experience, quickly became another important raw silk exporter. By the early nineteenth century, London had clearly emerged as an important center for the silk trade. The age of Pax Britannica, like the previous Pax Mongolica, reunified the silk trade of the Eurasian continent. However a fundamental change in this pattern of dual trading circuits in the East Asia bloc and the Euro-Middle-East bloc, had to await the coming of an internal crisis occurring within the world of the silk trade. During the 1850s and 60s, the silkworm disease called pebrine broke out in Southern Europe and gradually spread to the Middle East. In its worst years, the sericultural crop in Europe declined by as much as 75 percent (Cayez 1979: 558-9). 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 (Sugyiama 1988: 88). In 1869, the Suez Canal opened. Through the Red Sea route, French silk merchants could 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 18
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 maritime Silk Road thus ended its almost three hundred years of detour around the southern tip of the African continent. The long-cherished dream of Venetian merchants to obtain silk directly from China, the vision that sent the explorers of the fifteenth century out of the western end of the Mediterranean, had come true. Meanwhile, Chinese and Japanese silk crossed the Pacific again, this time to North America. The British colonial government long encouraged the transfer of sericulture and the silk industry to North America. However, scarcity of labor (particularly, skilled labor) and lack of sericultural traditions severely impeded progress. On the eve of the Civil War, the US silk-manufacturing industry remained small and produced unsophisticated products and its sericulture was next to non-existent. The erection of a tariff on the finished silk products for revenue purposes during the Civil War set the stage for the U.S. silk industry to take off. The American industry benefited significantly from the almost simultaneous decline of the British silk industry, resulting mainly from the British government’s abolition of the import tariff - a result of its free trade stand - against the more competitive European particularly French products. Significant numbers of British skilled silk workers and entrepreneurs, particularly from the town of Macclesfield, emigrated with European technology and machinery to lay the foundation for America’s leading silk town: Paterson in New Jersey. Behind the tariff wall, the U.S. silk industry grew quickly and by the twentieth century it had become the world’s largest importer of raw silk. By the 1920s and 30s, the production of the U.S. silk industry exceeded that of all European countries 19
Page 1 and 2: Reference: MA, Debin. “The Great
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Page 5 and 6: China arrived in Persia around 106
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Page 9 and 10: Chinese scholars also emphasized a
Page 11 and 12: If the closing of the first phase o
Page 13 and 14: was more favorable, in contrast to
Page 15 and 16: increasingly towards the sea route,
Page 17 and 18: production processes, from reeling
Page 19 and 20: growing silk-weaving sector. With t
Page 21: The success of Chinese silk product
Page 25 and 26: silk-reeling technology and the fac
Page 27 and 28: Figure 2.1 Westward diffusion of se
Page 29 and 30: important for wheeled transport. Th
Page 31 and 32: goods (McNeill 1971: 1115). As char
Page 33 and 34: “shackled” the overland trade r
Page 35 and 36: (Liu 1996). It was not just a symbo
Page 37 and 38: Pacific Centuries Conference in Mel
Page 39 and 40: Ma, D. (1996). The Modern Silk Road
Page 41: the mouth of the Don) to Cathay is

Reference: MA, Debin. “The Great Silk Exchange: How the World ...

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