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

[malloyd]

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.

[doulos05]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

You would have assumed wrongly. The India and China trades were enormously lucrative, enough that the profits of the British and Dutch East India companies were of geopolitical importance. Remember that this trade, conducted by slower, more vulnerable, and much more vulnerable overland caravans, had supported cities along the Silk Road for hundreds of years, and created the wealth of Constantinople and Venice.


I have to say that I'm kind of amazed to encounter an educated person who doesn't know about the explorations of the Fifteenth Century, why Columbus was looking for a short route to China, the Dutch and British empires in Asia, the Spanish trade across the Pacific, the Opium Wars….

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).

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by johndallman

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.

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

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

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.

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?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

...
I have to say that I'm kind of amazed to encounter an educated person who doesn't know about the explorations of the Fifteenth Century, why Columbus was looking for a short route to China, the Dutch and British empires in Asia, the Spanish trade across the Pacific, the Opium Wars….

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.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

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.

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

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by RGTraynor

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.

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.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

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.

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.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

I'm sorry if I've touched on a sore point. I didn't mean it sarcastically.

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.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

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

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.

[Flyndaran]

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.