What were the impacts of the global flow of silver in the early modern era?

World silver production flowed relentlessly into China because tremendous profits accrued to those who transferred silver toward/to end markets within China. This chapter portrays silver's progression through space and time via application of supply and demand mechanisms that elucidate market forces that drove and continue to drive production and relocation of monetary and non-monetary items alike. The supply-demand approach contrasts sharply with the traditional historical depictions that portray region-to-region physical transfers of silver coins as responses to alleged trade imbalances. Supply and demand mechanisms were constructed in order to analyze monetary and non-monetary products within a single theory that can be described as a Unified Theory of Prices (UTP). Three versions of the UTP exists namely a mathematical version, a graphical version and an intuitive, visual Hydraulic Metaphor version. The chapter explores visualization of global silver markets via Hydraulic Metaphor mechanisms.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2015

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What was the impact of the global flow of silver?

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