ABSTRACT
For over two millennia, silk was one of the most important commodities in the world economy. As early as the first century BC, in the form of trade goods, gifts or homage, precious silk fabrics were sent from the Chinese Empire to Rome and throughout a good part of Asia. Used for a considerable length of time in calligraphy, painting and the rituals of Buddhism, monks, pilgrims and merchants would take silk with them on their travels across Central Asia. From the eighth century onwards, the regions that had converted to Islam began to use it to make fabrics and these production techniques were soon transferred to Muslim Spain. Meanwhile, from the sixth century onwards, the Byzantine Empire had also acquired the tools necessary for the production of silk fabrics, of which extremely refined samples dyed with purple and reserved for the Imperial court were produced in the state workshops of Constantinople, or manufactured by independent artisans and entrepreneurs in Thebes and Corinth for a much vaster market. Between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, every year endless caravans would carry tonnes of silk from Persia to the Ottoman Empire and the regions ruled by the Mamlucks, and an even greater quantity would travel to the south-east, towards India, a trade that under the Safavid dynasty was controlled by Armenian businessmen. With the arrival of European ships in East Asia in the sixteenth century, the Portuguese began to supply Japan with Chinese silk via the trade-posts of Macao and Nagasaki, while by the end of the century the silver from the American mines of Potosi and Zacatecas was being transported by the Spanish to their new colonies in the Philippines where it was then traded for the fabrics that had been brought there by a populous colony of Chinese merchants. Once a year the King of Spain sent a galleon from Manila to sail the Pacific and transport Chinese silk to the Peruvian and Mexican
the emigration of Spanish experts in Mexico City and Puebla de los Angeles. However, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was the great East India Companies of Holland, England and France that were in charge of the distribution of silk from Asia in Europe, and they even participated in the flourishing silk market of Bengal. Silk can therefore rightly claim to have been one of the principle goods in the history of the early development of economic globalisation.1
