Main Trading materials during 1840s

katchen

Banned
Names are important. The Japanese call tea cha (or give it the honorific o-cha). The Russians call tea chai--obviously the same name. The Chinese call tea tea. Why the difference in names? And what does the difference in names say about who the Japanese got tea from, when they picked up drinking it and who they were importing it from before and during the Tokugawa Period?
 
Names are important. The Japanese call tea cha (or give it the honorific o-cha). The Russians call tea chai--obviously the same name. The Chinese call tea tea. Why the difference in names? And what does the difference in names say about who the Japanese got tea from, when they picked up drinking it and who they were importing it from before and during the Tokugawa Period?
Errr... what? As best as I can tell, Mandarin for tea is the same as the Japanese, with a rising tone.
 

katchen

Banned
That makes sense. Cha. Cha-i (Mandarin) Chai-Russian).
Tea would be the Indian term then, I suppose.
Some of the commodities that got traded a lot in the 1840s were some of the most common, but not always found were they were needed. Coal from where it was mined to where it was burned for home heating and steelmaking. Often coal was shipped in ships and had been since Elizabethan times.
Wool from as far away as Australia and New Zealand to Great Britain, but also from South Africa.
Cotton from the American South to Northern and British and French textile mills.
Coffee from Brazil and Central America to the US and Europe.
Sugar from the Java to the Netherlands, the West Indies and Queensland to Great Britain, the American South to the American North, the French West Indies and Corsica to France, from all these places to elsewhere in Europe and from Egypt to elsewhere in Europe.
Iron ore from Sweden to various nations in the German Zollverein.
Iron ore from the American Great Lakes to steel mills in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
 
Tea=thé, etc comes through Dutch from the Amoy dialect/language/version of chinese, which latter uses t'e, apparently. Since the West traded with southerners, a numbers of chinese words we borrowed were from cantonese, fujianese, amoy, etc.
 
need some clarification... does that mean Korea further developed its tea industry or Korea did not have any tea production?

It was physically farther. Though I suppose it could be considered closer than Japan. The more likely reason was that Korea was highly isolationist, even more so than Japan.
 
Tea=thé, etc comes through Dutch from the Amoy dialect/language/version of chinese, which latter uses t'e, apparently. Since the West traded with southerners, a numbers of chinese words we borrowed were from cantonese, fujianese, amoy, etc.

Intresting, in Portuguese the word is "cha" (pronounced "shah"), unlike in Spanish, a very similar language, which uses the word té.
 
back to the original question...what other trade materials would there be, putting tea aside, that would be good trade material in the Far East?
How about gold?
 
Some of the main trade goods were :

India to England : indigo, dyestuffs, muslins,medicinal extracts and plants, spices;saltpetre

England to India: cloth (mainly later, after tariff advantages) , weapons, wine (reexport), iron , tin ( not very successful) ,European foodstuffs and other supplies for the English expatriates.

The trade was biased in India's favour
 
a question- has Britain tried selling opium to India? China sure had a frenzy over it, would it have the same impact in the Indian subcontinent?
 
The opium sold to China came from India. If Indians wanted opium (some did) , they didn't need to buy it from the British, it was a common trade item. Suggest reading some Kipling.
 

Flubber

Banned
How about gold?


Gold was the problem.

Specie, that is gold and silver, were the only trade "goods" China accepted "officially". If you wanted teas or silks or anything else, you had to pay in specie, usually silver. There was a silver mine called Potosi in what is now Bolivia whose operation was a fair approximation of hell on Earth. It existed almost solely to support the Spanish Empire's trade with China because China wouldn't accept anything else.

What you're continually failing to comprehend here is that China didn't want to trade in a normal sense. China didn't want to exchange one set of goods for another set of goods. China only wanted gold or silver for it's goods, the amount of gold and silver available to give China for it's goods was finite, and the Europeans were scrambling to find anything which could take the place of gold and silver.

You couldn't sell China linens or pepper or dyes or anything else in return for teas, silk, porcelain, etc. Officially, you had to pay China in specie for the goods you wanted. Specie was "disappearing" into China, there was no balance, and something had to happen sooner or later. That's why it took an unofficial trade, an illegal trade, to break China's official specie-only trading policy.

Europeans began illegally selling the Chinese opium, the Chinese illegally paid silver to those Europeans for the opium, illegally, and the Europeans then used that silver to legally buy other Chinese goods.

You can examine all the 1840s trade goods you want but none of them will work because you don't understand China's 1840s official trade policy. Officially China will not exchange Chinese goods for foreign goods and officially China will not pay out Chinese specie for foreign goods. Officially China can only be paid in foreign specie for Chinese goods. That's why an unofficial, an illegal, trade in opium developed in which Chinese specie bought foreign goods and was then used to buy Chinese goods.
 
What he said.

Gold wasn't popular in China,and the exchange rate was adverse.

That is, a merchant in England could have 16 oz, roughly, of silver for 1 oz of gold.

But in China he could only get maybe 12 oz of silver back for his oz of gold. (it varied a fair bit but always adverse). Better to take the silver direct.

Hence, Britain had a chronic serious shortage of silver through the 18C and early 19C (not helped by the fact that the exchange against most European countries was also often slightly adverse, and the official British exchange rate was fixed by a statute of Elizabeth that noone was game to change).

And hence the triangle trade. Goods to India, sold to buy opium, opium to China, sold illegally for silver , silver used to legally buy tea etc, then back to England and sell for gold.

I dont think it was actually illegal to sell goods to China, just discouraged. They didnt want anything much we had, and thus imposed high tariffs and difficulties. There was some trade in woolens, for the colder areas.
 
I think there was a trade in ivory also, readily available in India. But the value of inward cargoes was small compared with outbound.
 

Flubber

Banned
But the value of inward cargoes was small compared with outbound.


Which brings us full circle.

China imported all of the goods mentioned in this thread and China imported goods which haven't been yet mentioned. What China didn't do was import enough of those goods to even remotely balance inward with outward trade.

Chinese regulations heavily discouraged, if not quite forbid, a large import trade. It wasn't that the Europeans didn't have goods or access to goods which millions of Chinese might purchase. It was that official policies worked heavily against such purchases.

That's why opium worked when all the other goods didn't. The Chinese who imported, sold, and used opium were more willing to ignore, break, and otherwise circumvent the many restrictive trade regulations in a way that those who imported, sold, and used sandalwood, ivory, furs, etc. were.

The Europeans couldn't keep pumping silver into China in return for tea, silks, and everything. They had to find something China would buy in sufficient quantities and the only something was opium.
 

RegNorth

Banned
Which brings us full circle.

China imported all of the goods mentioned in this thread and China imported goods which haven't been yet mentioned. What China didn't do was import enough of those goods to even remotely balance inward with outward trade.

Chinese regulations heavily discouraged, if not quite forbid, a large import trade. It wasn't that the Europeans didn't have goods or access to goods which millions of Chinese might purchase. It was that official policies worked heavily against such purchases.

That's why opium worked when all the other goods didn't. The Chinese who imported, sold, and used opium were more willing to ignore, break, and otherwise circumvent the many restrictive trade regulations in a way that those who imported, sold, and used sandalwood, ivory, furs, etc. were.

The Europeans couldn't keep pumping silver into China in return for tea, silks, and everything. They had to find something China would buy in sufficient quantities and the only something was opium.


The other alternative was to plant tea and mulberries in areas under their control
 
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