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

ased on a set of simple and ingenious ideas, landed on all the major continents of the
world by the sixteenth century. Ernest Pariset, a nineteenth-century French scholar of silk,
divided the long history of silk into four great ages: the age of the Chinese, the age of the
Arabs (and Byzantines), the age of the Italians, and the age of the French. Not long after the
publication of this book in 1862, Pariset began to call people’s attention to the possible loss
of Lyon’s leadership in world silk production and trade to the rise of the mass-producing
U.S. manufacturing (Allen 1904: 43). Both Table 2.1 and Figure 2.1 capture this
progressive westward surge of silk trade and industry across time and space.
What could be the driving force behind this grand march of silk across time and
space? The history of the Silk Road reveals that these “mysterious” and powerful forces
may just lie within the process itself - specifically I mean the process of trading not only in
goods, but also in knowledge. The silk exchange is nothing but part of the historical
dynamics of human interaction. It is part of a process where trade induces diffusion of
inventions which induces further growth of trade, an accelerating spiral of growth of trade
and technological exchange.
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