Beginning in the late sixteenth century, vast amounts of silver flowed from the New World into Ming and later Qing China. In this context, Manila played a key mediating role—by connecting the mining areas of New Spain and Peru with Chinese markets, it permitted the circulation of wealth on an unprecedented scale. As a consequence, economic historians have identified the foundation of Manila as the »birthdate of global trade«, making this bounty of silver a symbol of the seamless integration often associated with the first globalization. This project reframes that narrative by approaching the silver coins that circulated through these networks, not through the lens of abstract commercial flows or exchange-rate discrepancies, but as unstable and contested media of intercultural exchange. Cut, pierced, clipped, or chop-marked, these coins bear the traces of what Llanos will call »radical transactions«—punning on Quine’s ingenious thought experiment concerning the interpretation of an utterly foreign language—namely, the creative ways whereby Chinese and Spanish merchants transferred value pragmatically in the absence of a shared commercial framework, stable price equivalences, or mutual institutional trust.

Miguel Llanos de la Guardia holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago (2026). His first book project, tentatively titled The Money of Others: Translation, Trust, and Value along the Silver Way, investigates how differences in commercial practice and monetary culture were negotiated across Late Imperial China and the early modern Hispanic world in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the surplus meanings about value, exchange, and cultural difference these mediations generated. His broader research explores economic and literary imaginaries and representations of the other through the lens of cultural and translation studies, drawing on sources ranging from literary texts to material artifacts. He is an external collaborator on the project digitizing the Numismatische Zentralkartei (NZK) at the University of Vienna’s Institute for Numismatics and Monetary History. His work has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the La Caixa Foundation, among others.