Is this recency idea quite right? China was exporting silks, ceramics and tea and sucking in hundreds of tons of silver every year! Almost all of the silver from Potosi ended up in China. x.com/policytensor/s…

It's not true to claim that all silver from the New World ended up in China. There was some silver going to China, but it was not enough to make Chinese tax revenues larger than France's in the 17-18th centuries. Anyway, it's obvious that in the 30-year war, nobody in the war was worried about Chinese intervention. Hence, China was inserted into a separate geopolitical world. Europe was thus another world, a world that began expanding outside the continent through colonization in the 16th century. By the early 19th century, the whole planet was integrated into this European-centric system of international relations.

@policytensor They needed it for small change, iirc