Radical Transactions. Broken Coins, Silver Flows, and the Problem of Intercultural Translation in the Early Modern Pacific

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 founding 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 presentation reframes that narrative by approaching the silver pieces 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 will be called »radical transactions«—punning on Quine’s ingenious thought experiment concerning the interpretation of an utterly foreign language—namely, the various 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.