Metals and Monies in an Emerging Global Economy

Arturo Giráldez, Dennis O. Flynn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781351918015
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The literature on early-modern monetary history is vast and rich, yet overly Eurocentric. This book takes a global approach. It calls attention to the fact that, for example, Japan and South America were dominant in silver production, while China was the principal end-market; key areas for transshipment included Europe and Africa, India and the Middle East. Europeans were often just middlemen. Other monetized substances - gold, copper and cowries - must also be viewed globally. The interrelated trades in metals and monies are what first linked worldwide markets, and disequilibrium within the silver market in the 16th and 17th centuries was an active cause of this global trade.

1

Silver Production in Central Europe, 1450–1618

John U. Nef

THE history of silver is one of the few topics treated by economic historians which has caught the attention of civil servants, of other administrators, and of students of economics. Any general interest in economic history is welcome, for the development of this subject in its broader aspects, in its relations to other branches of history, can help pave the way for a fresh understanding of the history of civilization. The public interest in the history of silver can be explained to a considerable degree by its relation to the history of money and prices. Its importance for the recent history of civilization is small. But in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the modern age, when credit was relatively little developed, the supplies of silver played a greater part than they do today in determining the wealth and political power of sovereign states. During the Middle Ages and until the thirties of the sixteenth century most of the supplies for all the European countries had come from Germany and from other parts of the disintegrating Holy Roman Empire to the south and east. With the discovery of rich mines in South and Central America, the chief source of supplies shifted abruptly from central Europe to the New World, at a time when months were usually required to make the hazardous journey from Germany across the Atlantic.

Adolf Soetbeer’s enterprising work on the output of precious metal since the discovery of America,² has been the accepted source for figures concerning the production of silver in central Europe for some sixty years now. As a result of the public interest in the topic, Soetbeer’s statistical estimates have been widely reproduced. Exception has been taken to some of his methods, and scholars who have examined his pages critically know how heavily he leaned on guesses in compiling many of his estimates. Nevertheless, his statistics for the output of silver in Europe in early modern times continue to be printed as if they were subject to no serious question. His most prominent German critic regarded his estimates for Germany and the old Austro-Hungarian empire as very satisfactory.³

Since the publication of Soetbeer’s tract in 1879, many books and articles have dealt with the history of mining in central Europe. Data concerning silver production, not available when he wrote, have been collected by German scholars. A study of the new material available in print and a re-examination of Soetbeer’s work show that his statistical tables misrepresent, in at least three respects, conditions in central Europe during the age of the Renaissance and the century following the Reformation. In the first place they considerably understate the annual output of silver when the prosperity of the mines reached its zenith in the first half of the sixteenth century. Second, they do not fully reveal the rapid increase in production during the last half of the fifteenth century and the first two or three decades of the sixteenth. Third, they do not show at all adequately how sharp was the decline in production during the last five or six decades of the sixteenth century, when the states of Europe found their alternative source of supplies in America.

The period in the economic history of the German peoples and their Slavic neighbors which began about 1450 and ended in 1618 is of special interest today, when the expansive traditions of the German race are once more asserting themselves, and with greater force than ever before in history. The year following the first of the two dates, 1451, marked the Duke of Saxony’s grant of the right to use a new invention for separating silver from rich argentiferous copper ores with the help of lead.⁴ More than any other invention, this accounts for the great prosperity of mining and metallurgy during the century which followed.

The second date marks, of course, the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. By that time the industrial leadership assumed by the Germans, the Bohemians, and the Hungarians in mining and metallurgy in the age of the Renaissance, was already on the wane. England was becoming the chief power in heavy industry.⁵ The economic influence of the Germans outside central Europe was on the point of eclipse. As the strong industrial position obtained temporarily in the early sixteenth century by the peoples of central Europe was bound up to a considerable degree with the production of silver and copper, the course of silver output from 1450 to 1618 is interesting, not only in itself, but for the light it throws on the whole course of German economic history during this period.

The historical importance of silver production justifies a critical note concerning Soetbeer’s estimates. Even though it is not possible to substitute new statistical tables for those contained in his tract, it may be helpful to suggest that his tables give so incomplete a picture of the flood and ebb of mining prosperity in Continental Europe that the historian should always make allowances when he consults them.⁶ As guides to the course of German economic history in early modern times, they conceal more than they reveal.

I. PRODUCTION AT ITS ZENITH, 1526–35

Soetbeer’s tract contains statistical estimates for the annual world-output of silver in the following periods down to 1620: 1493–1520, 1521–44, 1545–60, 1561–80, 1581–1600, 1601–20. According to his tables, production reached its maximum in the countries of the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian empire during the period 1521–44 and in Germany during the period 1545–60. For central Europe as a whole (adding the figures which Soetbeer gives for Germany and Austria-Hungary), the annual output is represented as 47,000 kilograms in the period 1521–44, and 49,500 kilograms in the period 1545–60.

The new evidence made available since the appearance of Soetbeer’s tables indicates that the mines of central Europe were most fruitful somewhat earlier than he supposed, probably during the decade 1526–35, just on the eve of a very great increase in the imports of American treasure into Spain, which were apparently more than twice as valuable in the five-year period 1536–40 as in the five-year period 1531–35. The increase in imports in the thirties was due mainly to the opening of silver mines in the New World. Hitherto, practically all the treasure from America had come in the form of gold. Henceforth, silver imports overshadowed gold imports, substantially in value and overwhelmingly in weight.⁷

The most prominent of all the mining towns of central Europe at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries were Joachimstal in Bohemia, Mansfeld in the county of that name, Schneeberg, Annaberg, and Marienberg in Saxony, and Schwaz in the Tyrol. At no other place—with the possible exception of Neusohl in Hungary—was anything like a yearly average output of 40,000 marks of silver ever achieved for a decade in early modern times. Joachimstal was nearly twice as productive of silver in the decade 1526–35 as in any other decade before or after.⁸ Mansfeld and Annaberg had their most productive years in the thirties of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Editor’s Preface
• Introduction: Monetary Substances in Global Perspective
• I. Source Areas
• II. End Markets
• III. Intermediary Trade Routes
• Index