Jessica Scano
Mr. D’Auria
10 AP World History
Flow of Silver DBQ
The booming growth and development of silver during the mid-16th century to the early 18th century had various social and economic effects in many European, Indian, Japanese, and Chinese societies. The growth of silver in China and Japan made them ‘hot-spots’ for other nations. Britain, Portugal, and Spain plentifully benefitted from trading silver (doc 7, 4, 2) whilst other nations had discrepancies over the topic because it caused corrupt governments (doc 1, 3, 5, 6, 8).
The flow of silver had many negative effects as explained in documents 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6. Ye Chunji explains that the supply of silver was low. The “frugal” man (poor) couldn't get enough since they were so used to tradition ways of obtaining profits such as
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However, the “extravagant” man (rich) couldn’t get enough. It can be assumed that the wealthy were leaders of the government (doc 1). One can comprehend that Chunji gained his status through China’s merit-system, as a council was of high social status. Contributing to the poor nature of the flow of silver, Tomas de Mercado, a Spanish scholar, noted that “high prices “ruined” Spain. In other words, he explained how the market was inflated (doc 2). Wang Xijue expands on this by explaining how the government was corrupt. The economy did gain a large accumulation of wealth from the rise of silver, but the government official didn’t give enough of it out. As a result, people cannot pay their taxes and the price of grain is rising (doc 3). Also, the government was unable to pay back the people of their taxes because of the “scarcity of silver”. This is similar of what was mentioned by Xu Dunqiu Ming. Customers of dye shops used to be able to pay for items with “rice, wheat, soybeans, chicken, and other fowl”. Now with the rise of