Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderTrans-Pacific trade fact

From 1565 to 1815, Spanish ships known as the Manila galleons crossed the Pacific between Manila in the Philippines and Acapulco in Mexico, carrying Asian silk, porcelain and spices east and returning with American silver.

Manila and Acapulco, 1565–1815

TradeOceanHistoryCultureBusiness

The story behind the card

Usually only one or two galleons sailed each way a year. The westward run from Acapulco took about three months on the trade winds, but the return had to swing far north to catch westerly winds and could take four to six months, and scurvy and storms cost many lives. Much of the silver, mined at Potosí in today's Bolivia and at Zacatecas in Mexico, ended up in China, whose economy increasingly ran on silver. Chinese porcelain arriving in Mexico influenced the blue-and-white Talavera pottery of Puebla, and Manila grew into a meeting place for Chinese, Spanish, Filipino and Japanese traders. Dozens of galleons were wrecked over the route's 250 years.

Türkçe oku
1565'ten 1815'e kadar Manila kalyonları denen İspanyol gemileri, Filipinler'deki Manila ile Meksika'daki Acapulco arasında Pasifik'i geçti. Doğuya Asya ipeği, porseleni ve baharatı taşıyan kalyonlar, Amerikan gümüşüyle geri döndü.
Manila ve Acapulco, 1565–1815

Genellikle her yönde yılda yalnızca bir ya da iki kalyon sefer yapardı. Acapulco'dan batıya yolculuk alize rüzgârlarıyla üç ay kadar sürerdi. Dönüşte ise gemiler batı rüzgârlarını yakalamak için çok kuzeyden dolaşmak zorundaydı ve yolculuk dört ila altı ay sürebilirdi; iskorbüt ve fırtınalar pek çok denizcinin canına mal oldu. Bugünkü Bolivya'daki Potosí ile Meksika'daki Zacatecas madenlerinden çıkan gümüşün büyük bölümü, ekonomisi giderek gümüşe dayanan Çin'e gitti. Meksika'ya ulaşan Çin porseleni, Puebla kentinin mavi-beyaz Talavera seramiklerini etkiledi; Manila da Çinli, İspanyol, Filipinli ve Japon tüccarların buluştuğu bir kente dönüştü. Rotanın 250 yıllık tarihinde onlarca kalyon battı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Manila galleon
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderTrade

Cowrie shells, the glossy shells of small sea snails, served as money in parts of Africa, Asia and the Pacific for centuries, because they were durable, easy to count and carry, and hard to fake.

Cowries were used in China during the Shang dynasty, more than 3,000 years ago, and the Chinese sign for 'shell' still appears inside many characters to do with money, such as those for 'goods' and 'buy'. Most of the cowries used in Asia and Africa came from the Maldive Islands. The traveller Ibn Battuta saw them used as currency in the Mali Empire in the 1350s, and from the sixteenth century European ships carried them to West Africa by the ton, often as ballast. There they paid for everyday goods and taxes, and they were also used to buy enslaved people in the Atlantic slave trade. As imports soared their value fell, and colonial currencies replaced them around 1900.

Cowrie shell moneyRead card
WonderTrade

From around the eighth century, camel caravans crossing the Sahara linked West Africa with North Africa and the Mediterranean, carrying gold north, salt south, and books, scholars and ideas in both directions.

Camels, which spread across the Sahara in the first centuries AD, made the crossing practical: they could go for days without water between wells and oases. Salt cut in desert mines such as Taghaza was in huge demand in the West African savanna, which had gold but little salt, and the gold of the Ghana, Mali and Songhai empires reached Mediterranean mints. Caravans could number thousands of camels. Timbuktu grew rich on this trade and, from the fourteenth century, became a centre of Islamic learning around mosques such as Sankore; many thousands of manuscripts from its libraries survive today. The same routes also carried enslaved Africans north across the desert.

Trans-Saharan tradeRead card
WonderTrade

For more than two thousand years, Indian Ocean trade ran on the monsoon winds, which reverse with the seasons. Timing their voyages to them, merchants linked East Africa, Arabia, India, South-East Asia and China through a chain of busy ports.

In the northern Indian Ocean the monsoon blows from the south-west in summer and from the north-east in winter, so a ship could sail out on one season's wind and home on the next. A Greek sailing guide from the first century AD, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, already describes this trade between Egypt, Arabia, East Africa and India. Arab and Persian dhows (wooden sailing ships), Indian and Malay vessels, and later Chinese fleets used the same system; Admiral Zheng He's expeditions reached East Africa in the early 1400s. Ports such as Kilwa, Calicut and Malacca grew rich on spices, cotton cloth, porcelain and gold, and Islam, Swahili culture and many words travelled the same routes.

Indian Ocean tradeRead card
DriveTrade

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, six fairs a year in the Champagne region of north-eastern France were among the main meeting places of European trade, where Flemish cloth met Italian merchants, Mediterranean spices, credit and currency exchange.

The fairs rotated between four towns, Lagny, Bar-sur-Aube, Provins and Troyes, and each lasted several weeks, so that together they filled most of the year. The Counts of Champagne gave merchants safe conduct on the roads, and fair wardens enforced contracts and punished defaulters, so strangers from distant cities could trust each other. Deals were often settled on paper: debts run up at one fair were cleared at its end or carried over to the next, an early step towards modern banking. The fairs declined in the early fourteenth century. Champagne had passed to the French crown when its heiress married the future Philip IV in 1284; royal taxes rose, war disrupted Flemish trade, and Italian ships began sailing directly to Bruges.

Champagne fairsRead card
DriveTrade

The Suez Canal in Egypt, opened in 1869, links the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, so ships between Europe and Asia no longer have to sail around Africa. Dug partly by forced labour and later fought over by empires, it still carries a large share of world trade.

The French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps led the company that dug the canal. In its early years tens of thousands of Egyptian peasants were made to work on it under the corvée, a system of compulsory unpaid labour, until the practice was stopped in 1864. Egypt's debts later forced it to sell its 44 per cent stake to Britain in 1875, and British troops stayed in the canal zone until 1956. That year President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the canal, and Britain, France and Israel invaded. International pressure, above all from the United States, forced them to withdraw, a turning point in the end of European empire in the Middle East. In March 2021 the container ship Ever Given ran aground and blocked the canal for six days.

Suez CanalRead card
Next card in the archiveCowrie shells, the glossy shells of small sea snails, served as money in parts of Africa, Asia and the Pacific for centuries, because they were durable, easy to count and carry, and hard to fake.Read next →