Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

My current campaign, set in early Gothic European-style fantasy, is dealing with the repercussions of a Chinese-style "treasure fleet" (called the Hua) that landed about 50 years ago.

The treasure fleet made contact with the local Prince (Fürst) and traded some goods. They executed some sort of long-ranging contract, and then departed peaceably. Fifty years later, the Treasure Fleet's second generation of Hua has returned to check up on the Fürstentum's progress.

My meta-question is: what sort of development or result or trade goods are they likely to want from the Fürstenum?

(Whatever it is, they're not likely to get it. Their gifts of gunpowder, moveable print type, silk, and printed money caused a popular insurrection led by collegiate types and the clergy, and mostly supported by the peasantry. Although the rebellion succeeded in toppling the Fürst, the local barons were able to subdue the uprising and now rule over an insular society where gunpowder especially is tightly controlled.)

The PCs have dealt with the revelation of this secret history and its repercussions (rival barons trying out the forbidden "foreign technology" etc.). But they've also wondered what the Hua get out of the deal, which I haven't really thought about yet.

Any ideas?

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Gold and Silver are always an option, if its more plentiful in Europe than China.

You mentioned fantasy. Do the Europeans have access to some kind of magic that the Hua lack? Perhaps some books made with the new movable print type. Would.explain the absence - we'll give you fifty years to write up your magical knowledge in 500 or so books for our eunuchs, nobility, emperor and his advisors, and we'll give you these gifts in exchange.

Trade goods. Do the Europeans have access to some good(s) that would be an equal trade?

What is the Hua's situation? Are they at war? Perhaps they came looking for technology or allies. These Hua have gunpowder? Do they have steel? Steel weapons might prove a massive advantage. European armor was superior to Chinese armor - is the same true here? Plate will protect you from most weapons.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Well, what China imported (indirectly) from Europe during the actual Middle Ages included:

• Wool and woolen textiles.
• Glass. Up until the 6th century, blown glass was a strictly European/Near Eastern thing.
• Purple silk. Murex dye, apparently, went really well with animal-based fibers. The Chinese didn't have it; the Mediterranean did.
• Anything with an interesting design. For a variety of reasons, which boil down to fashion and avoiding sumptuary laws, the Chinese imported things like Western brocades.

If the ships are big enough, cavalry horses might go over well. China was an enthusiastic importer of horses, and the bigger the better.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Sailing directly from Europe to China would take an incredibly long time around the tip of Africa, wouldn't it?
That precludes all otherwise profitable bulk items.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Any of the same stuff they had in real life. The only difference would be lack of several middlemen.

Walrus tusks, furs, and such and such.

Slaves

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Ambergris might be an option -- there are sperm whales in the Pacific, but at least in the modern day there's more in the Atlantic.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Slaves are just people, and there would be loads more much closer to China.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Were items really bought at one end and sailed all the way to the other? I assumed stuff was bought and sold along the way making each end just one stop on a long route.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

From 150somethingorother (IIRC, 1509 is when the Portuguese got all the way around Africa to Aden) onward, most emphatically yes. The Age of Exploration was basically a giant exercise of European powers finding direct sea routes to points east, bypassing the slow and expensive trade relays of earlier centuries.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

I would think that sailing all the way around the large continent of Africa would still be quite slow and expensive jacking up prices and eating profits.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Compared to moving stuff overland (which is pound for pound more than an order of magnitude more expensive than transport by sea and significantly slower to boot), paying countless trade duties along the way, risking the occasional politically motivated trade embargo, and occasionally stopping for a few months as winters closed down important mountain passes, it was faster and cheaper.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

The mark up would still have been enormous and I would have assumed prohibitive.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

There are lots of people who see "Big ship with sailors on it" and think it looks more expensive than a few men with packhorses. The important factors include the much larger amount that the ship can carry per person working, the lack of cost for the animals and their feed, and the faster travel and relative lack of people taxing or stealing from you.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

How different is walrus ivory from elephant ivory? I've assume it's fairly hard to tell the difference, but I don't actually know, and I'd like to. If it's pretty similar, then the Chinese already have plenty of ivory from Indian elephants.

Slaves are expensive to move long distance, because food is non-abundant in a medieval economy (although perhaps at medieval tech levels food could be semi-abundant in China due to rice farming techniques). Unless they have some magical hibernation trick (actually used in a John Christopher alt history novel, about Chinese exploring the Americas, via self-hypnosis induced hibernation), only truly exceptional slaves are worth moving huge distances.

Although for sexual purposes exoticness does have a high value in itself. I could see pretty young women (and a few young men) being transported to China, and pretty Chinese transported back the other way. But other than that, you'd need slaves with exceptional skills, and those are rare.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

In Denmark, one word for navigation is orientation, which literally means to find the East - to find the direction from which desirable valuables (such as silk) comes: The Orient.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

You'd be assuming wrong. Of course they didn't move low-value density stuff, but items such as pepper aren't exactly high-value density, and AFAIK silk isn't much more value-dense than pepper. It's just a question of the goods being moved being sufficiently exotic at the other end, and markers of high status (capital-S Status in systems such as GURPS and Sagatafl) and prestige, that people are willing to pay a high price for them.

(Note that in a medival context, some of the route was probably overland - one reason that so many people were horny to own Jerusalem had nothing to do with religion, but was because it was an important transit hub on the East-West route during medieval times. I imagine the goods were moved by ship along the south Asian coast, to Araby or thereabouts, then overland to Jerusalem or sometimes some other port, then by ship from there again.)

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

GURPS Low-Tech, at least the 3E version, says the transport cost of moving something by river is 5 times lower than moving overland, and 5 times lower again (25 times total) by ocean.

I found that extremely useful to know, from a worldbuilding and worldbuilding'ish perspective, back when I first bought it about 13-15 years ago, and it hadn't been obvious to me before I read it.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

It's easier to get when you've played Patrician III. Overland is a small part but the difference between small and large ships is not. I usually use small ones but I specialize in luxuries and use bulk cargo as "kintledge"(New England term for cargo bought to avoid having an empty hold).

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Possibly. I haven't fleshed out all the magical aspects of the campaign world yet, but I will need to do that eventually. The Big Bad of the European domain is a lich masquerading as a living king, and his Evil Plot is to gather one master practitioner of every magical art in the realms to split the dimensions, and so certainly the Hua interest him, because their omission from his project could mean an unrepresented magical art. (So far my theoretical "flavors" of magical arts that the Hua use would be Fengshui style geomancy, yin-yang internal/external chi-based arts, and Celestial divine favor which is partially represented by the Dragon as interlocutor between the gods and men. If you can suggest any further ones, I'd be happy to hear them!)

This can be left wide open. I'm happy to have a situation where the Hua are squabbling over a vacant or weak Imperial seat, with several kingdoms observing surface courtesies to peace, but jockeying for power behind the scenes. The merchants who came over to the West would already be considered fairly low-ranking folk in the Hua bureaucracy, so it's entirely possible that they're also willing to break various other taboos, including studying foreign academic/religious texts, copying foreign tech, and intermarrying with foreign folks.

One possibility is that the Hua society is extremely rigid and circumscribed, and the chaos and volatility of the European-style countries is a powerful contrast: revolutions in thought and deed lead to change and suffering, but also to advances and further knowledge.

Another possibility is that this could be a revamp of the "ageing Emperor seeks immortality elixir" trope, from Earth's Qin dynasty. This could lead to very interesting interactions if you consider the European leader has already found a (partial) solution on his own through lichdom. If an undead king comes up against an undead emperor, who wins? That sort of thing.

But this is probably hijacking my own thread, so I move quickly on to the issue of the goods themselves...

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Very good - these could all go nicely into a trade balance for the Hua.

One other (completely random) thing that I remembered offhand was this: on a sidequest, the PCs encountered a fledgling crop farm in the foothills, which had transplanted drug crops and was trying to make them grow in the European-style domain's climates. I didn't actually specify what drug crop it was (and this side quest already happened about half a year ago), but it could certainly lend itself to interesting historical echoes if an opium trade sprang up...

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

A point you shouldn't overlook is that a treasure fleet every 50 years is not *intended* to be a moneymaking trade venture. It's a prestige project. A lot of what it collected was labeled tribute and valued mostly as a sign of the trivial little foreign states acknowledgement of their submission to the universal authority of the Emperor of the Center of the World. It's effectively a negligible contributor to the net trade between Europe and China over this period even if all the rest of it creeps over the Silk Road. It might be a non-negligible fraction of the trade in the particular year it happens to take place, but still wouldn't likely be the majority.

As for what Europe supplied China, the bulk of the value was usually silver. European states being superstitiously attached to their silver (and in fairness this was less silly in the days before anybody understood monetary policy well enough to manage a fiat currency) they were always looking for an alternative, but by and large didn't find one until they hit on opium.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Tea was prohibitively expensive for a very long time in Europe and it was generally considered the mark of a rich person to have tea.

As someone else said, the trade fleets were meant to collect tribute indicative of status within the middle kingdom. The most common tributes were gold, silver, men and women to serve in the court, books, maps (to indicate the extent of the emperor's rule), astrological readings (to improve astrological predictions), and things which they are famous for producing (sometimes as ordered by the emperor, sometimes as selected by the locals).

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Of course. But if I don't know jack about a subject, I'm not going to make any statements of fact about it.

Those totals are a game fiat, and differ wildly Depending: it's like asserting that the ratio of gold-to-silver and silver-to-copper are both 1:25.

Going back to the OP, there's a crucial question bearing on the issue: what kind of traders are the Hua, generally? Are there trade fleets -- or other large-scale trading -- between them and other areas? India? Japan? The Spice Islands?

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

I have barely more than a high school education. My crippling anxiety stopped me from attending any school after a few terms of college.

I thought the opium wars were steam age, not near middle ages age of sail.

It's the idea that the gargantuan distances all the way around Africa over 10, 000 miles one way allowed hefty profit when mere hundreds of miles across land didn't at all that sounds odd.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

You're welcome to burn your copy of GURPS Low-Tech, if you don't appreciate it. I greatly appreciate mine.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Yes, but they are the right order of magnitude, like "in the preindustrial Old World, gold was worth about ten times as much as silver per pound" (there were places where the ratio was closer to 20:1, and places where it was closer to 2:1, but its very hard to find places where they traded at par or at 100:1). If one wants an exact figure for a given setting, one can play around with The Economics of Subsistence Agriculture and the works of Christopher Dyer and get something plausible.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Its about 5,000 miles from Rome to Beijing, and quite a lot of the land in between is desert, mountain, or just broken or poor enough to support lots of bandits.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

No problem. It's sore, but I don't/can't blame anyone for it. Goodness knows I respond sarcastically far too often to get hypocritically offended even if you meant it that way.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

They were, but in the part of the steam age when ships were mostly still powered by sail, especially for long distances.

Steam ships don't displace sails for cargo traffic until quite late, because fuel costs money and because for a long voyage you either need a network of ports that sell fuel, or an engine so efficient you can carry enough aboard for the entire trip. Steam ships didn't get competitive even on trans-Atlantic cargo runs until after 1900, and there were steel hulled but sail powered cargo ships making money on the Australia to Europe grain trade (a long trip away from developed ports with a high bulk per unit value cargo and no particular need to keep a schedule) into the 1950s.

In some ways it has the same problem that makes pre-industrial land transport so expensive. Animal feed costs money and carrying more than a couple days of food uses up all your animal's carrying capacity, not leaving any for the cargo, so any place that requires you to make a long hop between places you can buy large amounts of food is effectively an impenetrable barrier to trade. Same deal for steamship fuel, except coaling stations require even more organizing than food depots.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

I admit defeat to my previously held misinformation.
Of course I knew sea travel was cheaper per pound/mile, but I didn't know it was a few thousand times so.
I feel like talking to someone that can't understand why missions to Mars are so insanely harder than ones to the moon. A painful ignorance of scale.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

I meant I feel the embarrassment personally that I normally feel for someone showing extreme ignorance. I accidentally conveyed the exact opposite of what I meant.

So it's profitable to land trek bulk goods hundreds of miles? I thought the double markup was around 100 miles.
Either way, I admit my mistake, and won't derail the thread further.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

That's the rule-of-thumb distance for transporting grain and similarly priced bulk goods, not for overland transport in general. The cost of transporting the fuel you need (in this case, grain to feed the draft animals) equals the cost of any load of fuel you could carry after that distance, so there's a limit to how far you can profitably transport the fuel itself.

However, the cost per pound per mile is the same if you're transporting other goods; it makes no difference to the camel. If you can sell something at the end of your trip for far more than the cost of an equivalent load of bulk grain, you turn a profit. So while nobody's going to load a camel up with grain and try to take it from Chang'An to Paris ('cause the camel will eat up the value of that load of grain many times over in other grain along the way), you could do that with something which you can sell for an immense price, like silk or cinnamon. The markup is huge, but so is demand for your exotic goods.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Sorry for derailing the thread into what must seem like horribly basic history.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Very few people travelled the entire Silk Road. But aside from danger, tariffs would become forbidding as each prince along the way got a piece of the action. The gargantuan distance around Africa cut out the overhead. A ship the size of those commissioned for it can carry provisions for it without stopping in cities to buy and can carry enough arms for self-defense quite easily. The transport capability was far more efficient lot for lot then overland. Moreover it needs comparatively few mouths. Planks and nails don't have to eat and while rigging has to be repaired and replaced it is a small price compared to all the people and animals that would have to be fed.

The actual distance is meaningless once you have the technology. Think in terms of effort expanded and results obtained. If a given Merchant House sent the equiv amount of goods through the Silk Road it would count itself lucky to get halfway as close to India or China in the same time period for the same expense. In fact it would probably be impossible.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

It is not basic history. Most people don't know much about the subject at all.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Don't feel bad, we've all be there at some point.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

You didn't upset me... in this thread at least. ;)

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Sure, but depending on the culture, it might not be okay to enslave the people nearby, who are pretty similar (culturally, racially, or whatever) to yours. But slaves from some far-off (and no doubt, barbaric) land might be acceptable.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Assuming some resemblance to Real Life Ancient China, the Chinese sell their own children into slavery. And consider them far superior to any foreign barbarian.

Luxury slaves (this is a euphemism) might be valued for exotic looks, but otherwise, no interest.


Hans

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

I remember on Emperor of the Sea a scene where one Korean merchant chieftainess is personally acting as a creepily Affably Evil sort of schoolmarm to children being groomed to be concubines for Chinese nobles. To be fair that is not quite the same as selling children to a street brothel if one wishes to make distinctions and it might even be a more comfortable life then a peasant girl would have.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

That would not be historically correct for race/skin colour. Nobody did racial slavery until the age-of-sail or thereabouts. Certainly not in the medieval period. Slavery-by-culture might be possible, but it still sounds odd t me.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Indeed, ending up the bed-slave of a high-status man is a form of social mobility.

Although from a certain perspective, it's important whether the move is for life, or only for half a decade or so until the woman's owner thinks she's gotten too old - what happens to her then?

Some bed-slave owners might set their slaves free with a parting gift, a reward for "good behaviour" and so that she can have a decent life and support the owner's bastard children, but many can't afford that, or can but aren't sufficiently satisfied with the slave's apparent level of fidelity (or use that as an excuse anyway even though she has been "good"). All that is common behaviour (manumission, and giving the reward, or withholding it with cause or without) for upper class gentlemen in my Ärth historical fantasy setting.

Ending up the concubine of a King or Emperor, though, is likely a move for life. He'll have the resources to not need to manumit those he's no longer interested in, and won't have to demote then to kitchen work because he can afford to maintain his idle ex-concubines.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

The alternative to selling children into slavery was often that the children starve.


Hans

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Rescuing from the fire back into the frying pan isn't much of a choice.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Well, no, but I was giving the situation some leeway, as it IS a fantasy analog, not an exact duplication. It might be interesting for the "Chinese" to claim they disapprove of slavery... And then the PCs find out part of the trade deal with them cleared out the debtors' prisons.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

A lot of slavery was associated with opportunism. The reason it is called slave instead of thrall was that there was a lot of prey in the Ukraine. It is more likely for a culture to be already associated with slavery by outside factors then to be first associated with slavery and then enslaved.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Several concubines in China were clan-founders. I don't think "bastard" would quite be the word for her children's status though; a closer analogy would be the child of a Scottish handfast.

Older concubines in a harem could actually be useful. They can act as advisors, or beauticians, and have domestic role similar to eunechs.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Sure. If the man can afford to keep the older concubines fed and clothed, he might we well keep them. If they're supported at a sufficiently high quality of life, they won't want to be set free anyway. And an Emperor or King can certainly do that.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

It's also worth noting that few systems of slavery were as hard on the slave as the US South circa 1850...

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Sex slave is horrific with or without whipping and maiming.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

I agree. Just think of the abuses married women had to tolerate back in the old days (And many still have to tolerate even today). And with no realistic way to escape the husband, it was, or could be, for all intent and purposes slavery, except for the selling part (Well, the selling part was rare -- reselling anyway).

Truly horrific.


Hans

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

That's a very important point. Most people automatically assume conditions, and de facto rights (or rather lack thereoff), similar to US South racial slaver mid 19th century, when they encounter a historical or historical fantasy setting featuring slavery, but in almost all other cases, slaves had it a lot better than the plantation slaves of the US South.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

The moveable print type is an idea the Europeans would profit more from than the Chinese, because the Latin letters are much better suited for printing than the unwieldly and numerous Chinese pictograms.

Silk is a classical Chinese Export good coveted by Europeans for ages - there had been a thriving silk trade back in Roman times. But exporting silk is one thing, exporting the means to make silk (silkworms) is another - the Chinese tried to keep the latter a secret. (To no avail. As far as I know a Byzantian envoy acquired silkworms and smuggled them out of the Middle Kingdom at some time in the medieval period).

Gunpowder is another thing the Chinese might be careful to give away as a gift. Once Europeans (and Turks) knew how to produce it, they soon began to field better guns than the Chinese did.

As far as printed Money is concerned, that would not be appreciated so much. In fact, it was introduced in China in a state of financial difficulty and caused an economic collapse. Europeans (of medieval times up to the 20th century) would see it as, well, paper, nothing more.

The one Chinese export item that seems to have not been mentioned so far is - china. Porcelane that is. That material was coveted by Europeans, who considered it a wonderous kind of glass (it isn't, although it does have a similar consistency). Again, the Chinese kept the means of production a secret. Centuries later, the German alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger would discover the way of its creation (it isn't actually that difficult, basically one needs a certain kind of loam and high temperatures). Soon Saxony began to produce beautiful porcelane themselves, which even the Chinese started to import eventually.


What could the Europeans give back in return? Arms and armor? Perhaps. The Venetians at least knew how to make uncolored glass (a closely guarded secret, production took place on an island for secrecy). But mainly, Europe could give ideas to China. Ancient Greek and Roman knowledge for instance. Once the Renaissance begins, Europe is abuzz with new ideas, from painting and sculpting to the beginnings of science. It could transform China, as it would transform Europe (and later the world), if the Chinese are not too arrogantly to pick up what they see.

That may exactly be the problem, however. When the explorers report back to the Middle Kingdom, the impression would likely be that medieval Europeans are nothing but barbarians. "Well, that was to be expected...So, what could we possibly learn from them? I said it from the beginning: these exploration missions are a waste of money, nothing else."

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Paper money requires a very respected government to do it and China was a multi-millenia empire not a quarrelsome confederation held together only by religion and not always that. The Mongol khans did try it once in the Middle East and it was a flop.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

I'm told Europe also got to a variety of precision tools, clockwork and spectacles faster and with more facility than the Chinese...

Could depend where you were - the average Roman slave, for example, was probably not much worse off than a free domestic servant but if you happened to be in one of the latifundia or the big mining or quarrying complexes as a slave, things were arguably worse. But your point is generally correct - slavery, say, under the Saxon model was nothing like plantation slavery...

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Pretty sure the Roman mines were considered a death sentence; however, being sent to the mines was generally a criminal punishment, and working criminals to death has lots of examples.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Most of those had a large number of mid-level jobs that were comfortable enough but caused freemen to lose status from engaging in.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

I think to work for any real length of time requires a form of Economics TL and leaders resisting the temptation to blow up inflation. Adding a zero to paper denomination is so much easier to do yet harder to understand why it's bad when compared to halving the amount of gold/silver in coins.

I suggest this knowing virtually nothing about economics. So if I'm writing things that are obviously nonsense to those educated, please someone set me straight.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Local bus drivers probably catch flak for having "menial" jobs, but they get serious pay and benefits here in the Portland Oregon metro area.
Yet high class doctors often have obscene school loan debts and insurance premiums eating most of their take home pay.

On paper life is often quite different from how that life is viewed by others and yourself.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

That sounds right. There are a couple TL innovations in economics in there. One when you first realize paper money is really a loan from the people who take the money to the issuer, and you should limit issue to metals you actually have - which you could use to pay back the debt, or at least to an amount you'd be comfortable owing. Hence the successful early versions being specie backed, at least fractionally, or explicitly bonds. The second one happens when you can measure enough stuff about your economy to determine how much more than that you dare issue because it is going to stay in circulation rather than the debt holders trying to collect.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

All money is really a loan. That is, insofar as it is perceived as a trade good it gains a value separate from whatever(if any)functional value it has. Gold and silver are chiefly decoration when they are not money but a merchant needs only so much to lavish on his mansion.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

That WOULD happen, I'm sure...

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Gold has significant value in the electronics industry.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

It has uses where extreme corrosion resistance and electric conductivity is needed, and even then only in really tiny amounts.
One could easily argue that copper has FAR more valuable necessary uses.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

My brother's a Trimet bus driver, so I feel comfortable talking about how it obviously doesn't take a rocket scientist to do.... or a very good driver.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Indeed, copper is much more used, but where gold is needed, it is NEEDED (tho' it is used a lot where it's merely desirable, not needed). And Gold, as an industrial commodity alone, would still be more expensive than copper or iron... because the amount used is high relative to the production. And without its decorative use, there wouldn't be such demand for gold as to keep the price low... save for its uses in electronics. And it would still be desirable for lots more than its needed uses were it not pretty.

Gold's universal value is because of several factors... not the least of which is that, of all the metals, it's one of the few that occurs naturally in a recognizable base metal alloy state, can be worked without fire, is naturally uncommon. Estimates of total worldwide gold production throughout history are usually under 180,000 tonnes... smaller than a cube 25m on a side.

Copper, meanwhile, was about 16,000,000 tonnes in 2010 alone... last year's copper mining probably exceeded the total world gold mined through history by a factor of 100....

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

The majority of the world's present supply of gold has been mined as tiny percentages in ores, not macroscopic lumps.

There was an interesting program called, "What's the Earth Worth?" that covered (close to) surface materials and how much they would sell for at present prices, already removed, and whatever's left.
It's interesting how little the precious metals counted compared to certain other materials.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

That's a good reason why he shouldn't catch flak not why he should. Rocket scientists(who among other things make SAMs which are of course the chief alternative to flak) are entitled to plenty of flak; they deal with sophisticated theories and if they make mistakes someone else should point it out. They need to be kept on their toes by each other and by outsiders lest there be another Challenger. A bus driver is staying out of the kitchen(to mix metaphors) and therefore should escape a little of the heat.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

In any case what I meant on the original point was that the difference between Southern Slavery and other forms was not that a lot of slaves in other systems did not end up in conditions as bad as any black slave. It was that those were usually societies where for some reason there was a vast gap of middle class occupations which the elite would not touch and which they were willing to give to slaves. A lot of slaves ended up as bureaucrats, artisans, police, or even soldiers. Slave soldiers is a kind of weird idea but one can see the point of slave police; it makes sure they do not favor any one faction, and also finds someone to do the nastier parts of pre-modern law enforcement without a stigma(being a knoutmaster was a prestige job in Czarist Russia for some reason, but with that weird exception aside I can see lots of reasons for wanting a slave for that job).

In the South there were plenty of white men who were satisfied to be craftsmen, or merchants. And so there were few servile jobs that were comfortable besides domestics. Though I remember reading of one riverboat captain who had a slave crew. I don't know if that was more comfortable then the archetypical hellish plantation, but it does sound more comfortable for some reason.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

I think the criterion is whether there is an infinite or finite amount of labour available for the slaves to perform.

On any farm or plantation, the answer is largely "infinite". There are almost more ditches to dig, more stuff to haul, even if harvest itself is limited to the acres or hectares that were planted. And on a huge farm, the mid-end to high end of what GURPS Fantasy terms "The Isolate" (where a Viking Age farmsteam would be a small "isolate" and function markedly differently from a Roman slave-farm) they'll be doing multiple crops: Wheat, olives, wine, some kind of legume, maybe other grains too, and one or two vegetables, so that there's always something to harvest or rows to weed.

Even worse in a mine. There there's no limit whatsoever. It's easy to work mine slaves to death. There are always more tunnels to dig, more ore to break up and haul out, and to crush. In a mine, the amount of work available is truly infinite.

A slave brothel set up in a good location, a port town or a caravan town, a trade hub, with many lonely men passing through, is comparable to the farm, not the mine. A slave prostitute would end up having to service a lot of men. Again, words like "fate worse than death" begin to be meannigful. (And a slave brothel would rarely be set up in a non-good location.)

Compared to that, the river boat is a finite amount of work. You need to have the decks scrubbed, and so forth, but once they're scrubbed, that's it. The passengers need various services, but again there is a finite number of passengers on any given day. The owner or the captain can adjust the number of slaves on the boat, so that if he lowers the number of slaves but the amount of passengers remains the same, the slaves will have to work harder. Likewise, he can increase the number of slaves which will lighten their work burden if the passenger amount remains unaltered. But the slaves working on the river boat will reach a point, most days, when they can see that their daily work is done, there are no more tasks to do. Then they can relax.

I believe that may be what your intuitively seeing when you write (comparatively) more comfortable.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Slaves are great only as long as you have year round need for work that no machine or beast could do even horribly inefficiently.
Human slaves have a horrible overhead compared to nearly every herbivore on earth per pound of force output.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

There is also a certain distancing that occurs in plantations and mies. The owner is dealing with levels of overseers who at the lower level and maybe next up are also slaves. So they see the majority of the slaves as equipment not people. If you have household slaves or ship crew they are few enough and you interact with them enough that you see them as people(ish). Makes you less willing to abuse them unless they actually screw up or are there when you have a bad day. Plus they are less interchangeable, a field hand is replaceable, a good cook matters.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

That's true for all human interactions and control. From business oversight to war. Dehumanizing the unknown or alien is natural when to do otherwise causes you hardship or tough decisions.
Anything at all that makes a person not your family makes it infinitely easier to treat callously.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Yup. The distance thing is one of the points I make in my Elfland article series on my blog, and which I'll also be making if I get started on an Ärth Wiki some time next year (since many of the cultures of Ärth have slavery as a major feature, and it's extremely harmful if the players arrive into the minds of their characters with a very wrong set of assumptions, e.g. an American Plantation-shaped set of assumptions).

Quality of life for a slave can be quite tolerable (just being a worker who doesn't get paid a salary), if he or she is within eyesight of the actual owner, which usually means in the owner's household, and being managed directly by the owner or by a senior slave (often a butler slave) but still in the same house as the owner. Or quality of life can be extremely crappy if the slave lives hundreds of kilometers from where the owner lives. "Out of sight, out of mind".

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

It's not so much that slave life was tolerable as freemen's life was only marginally better.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Actually that is a good description. Certainly the fact of being saleable is not pleasant.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Actually many intelligence assets are best described as slave spies to this day. They are kept in place by blackmail or threat of prosecution or whatever.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

And reality renders concepts like wage-slavery not completely hyperbole.
While just being a member of society includes necessary restrictions on actions, it's all a fuzzy spectrum sliding to complete 19th century American slavery horror.

Re: Alt.history - What trade could Europe and China have in the middle ages?
 

Indeed. One way to control a slave is to threaten to sell him. That is pretty scary. Even if the slave thinks his owner is a pretty horrible person, he can probably imagine an even worse owner.

That's also why many slaves never run away, particularly female slaves. They have no expectation of achieving actual freedom. They know they'll end up captured and re-enslaved by someone else, so they understand it as a gamble: Is it worth the risk of replacing one's owner with a known degree of horribleness with someone who might be worse? In some cases, of course, the answer is yes, and that's one "force" that keeps most slave owners from being too abusive.