A World in Pieces: Silver and Otherness in the Seventeenth-Century Chinese and Spanish Empires

A World in Pieces examines how value, commercial knowledge, and cultural difference were produced and circulated during the long seventeenth century (1571–1700). It focuses on the commercial networks linking, through the circulation of silver and other commodities, Iberian Spain to China via the New World. Historians have extensively traced this global circulation of silver across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Far less attention has been paid, however, to how people made sense of this expanding commercial world when reliable information about distant economies, monetary practices, and societies remained fragmentary and often unreliable. Rather than treating such gaps in knowledge as a commercial limitation, this dissertation argues that uncertainty itself became a productive condition through which economic value and cultural difference were negotiated in the early modern world.

Its central claim is that differences in estimation, commercial practice, and monetary form, along with asymmetries in commercial knowledge, were not simply obstacles to be overcome at the moment of exchange. They were, instead, sites where economic interpretation, political imagination, and intercultural representation became mutually constitutive. Where no shared framework of value or authority could be assumed, small bits of often unreliable information acquired unusual symbolic force. Circulating rumors, apocryphal anecdotes, mediated accounts of foreign money, and coins arriving from afar became potent symbolic elements that transformed unfamiliar monetary and commercial practices into evidence of the moral, political, and cultural character of distant peoples. Commercial exchange thus emerged not as the transparent circulation of goods, but as a meaning-making process through which value and alterity were continually co-produced.

The dissertation develops this argument through a deliberately heterogeneous corpus of Chinese and Hispanic texts and objects, each situated between two cultural worlds whose points of equivalence remained unsettled. It shows how Juan González de Mendoza's Historia del Gran Reino de China (1585), written without firsthand experience of China, transformed reports of Chinese silver money and other commercial elements into a reflection on Spanish political economy. It follows a likely apocryphal account of indigenous groups in the Andes shoeing horses with silver, reworked by José de Acosta and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega into competing claims about value and imperial authority. It examines how Zhang Xie's Dongxiyang kao (1617) converted fragmentary reports about Manila into authoritative knowledge about the Spaniards' commercial practices and moral character through citation and repetition. And it traces how chopmarked Mexican eight-reales coins acquired credibility in southern China through vernacular practices of testing that rendered, rather than erased, cultural difference, and the ways in which this was interpreted by the different actors involved.

By reading Chinese and Hispanic materials as participants in a shared process of global transformation rather than as parallel traditions, the dissertation relocates the early modern crisis of representation within the transcultural negotiations involved in the early modern globalization. It argues that the emerging transoceanic commercial networks connected the early modern world not by establishing a universal economy of value, but by unsettling inherited ideas of money, value, and commercial practice, continually generating new forms of interpretation, comparison, and cultural otherness through the very act of exchange.