In the sixteenth century China’s economy was booming but faced constant silver shortages. America was full of silver; so Europeans responded to China’s needs by getting Native Americans to claw a good 150,000 tons of precious metal out of the mountains of Peru and Mexico. A third of it ended up in China. Silver, savagery, and slavery bought the West “a third-class seat on the Asian economic train,” as Frank put it, but still more needed to happen before the West could “displace Asians from the locomotive.”
