Historian Reveals 2000 Years Of Chinese Economic Power | Michael Pembroke

## China’s long economic preeminence and the recent aberration The conversation paints a strikingly simple — and unsettling — picture: for roughly two millennia China has been the central engine of global prosperity, and what the world has taken for granted over the past two centuries is historically anomalous. This thesis, advanced throughout the discussion and given particular emphasis by Michael Pembroke in his recent work, reframes familiar narratives about “discovery,” European ascendancy, and the inevitability of Western industrial dominance. Seen from this longue durée, Europe’s turn toward overseas expansion, mercantile wars, and eventual geopolitical hegemony looks less like a natural culmination than like a disruptive detour from two thousand years of Asian-centred trade and wealth flows. ## The early Eurasian exchange: silk, silver and Roman fascination The exchange between China and the Mediterranean world began far earlier than most popular histories suggest. Long before the era of Atlantic navigation, silk and other luxury goods reached Roman markets via long overland and maritime corridors. Under Augustus, Rome institutionalized and expanded maritime routes through the Red Sea to ports on the Indian Ocean littoral, and luxury Chinese imports—most notably silk—captured Roman imagination. The economic impact was not trivial. Roman elites spent vast amounts of coin on novel, status-laden products; contemporary critics fretted publicly about the drain of specie to the East and the social frivolity of consuming foreign luxury. Important here is the asymmetric nature of the exchange. Chinese markets had little appetite for Roman staple exports, but they prized precious metals, particularly silver. Over centuries, silver was the primary medium through which Chinese demand for foreign scarcity goods was satisfied. That pattern — Asian appetite for bullion and European (and later global) supplies of precious metals — became a structural feature of pre-modern world trade. It also seeded anxieties in Europe when commentators like Isaac Newton, David Hume, and others opined that trade with China threatened European reserves and, by implication, political stability. ## Intermediaries and the Eurasian middle: Sogdians, Parthians, and the limits of contact Rome’s contact with China was mediated by a chain of intermediary powers and merchant cultures. The Sogdians, centered in eastern Central Asia, emerged as the quintessential middlemen: expert camel-traders who navigated mountain passes and desert basins to shuttle luxury goods westwards. Simultaneously, the Parthian state played gatekeeper to the Iranian plateau, securing rents and preventing direct Roman penetration into the full breadth of Eurasian markets. These intermediaries shaped the tempo and optics of contact. For Roman soldiers encountering silk pennants on Parthian standards or for senators watching silk awnings replace their traditional linen, China was no longer an abstraction but a proximate site of wonder — yet always filtered through successive hands. The result was a trade that enriched many along the chain without producing prolonged direct integration between Western Europe and China. ## Pax Mongolica: overland integration, mobility and the myth of discovery The Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century rewrote the geography of connectivity. The so-called Pax Mongolica established unprecedented security across vast stretches of Eurasia, enabling persons, missionaries, envoys, and merchants to traverse from Europe to China with a level of safety previously unknown. The great anecdotes of the era — envoys of the Pope reaching the court of the Great Khan, Chinese emissaries reciprocating, and Europeans reaching the Far East in person — all derive from Mongol-enabled integration. This development helps to explain why the popular story of “discovery” by figures like Marco Polo is both consequential and misleading. Polo’s travels during the Yuan period made him a striking medium for Europe’s encounter with East Asia, but trade with China long predated him. Marco Polo’s narrative became a cultural hinge partly because Mongol patronage made sustained European presence plausible and vivid, not because he uniquely “found” China. The Mongol interval thus serves as a reminder that infrastructure and political order — even violent imperial order — can produce significant commercial openings and new knowledge networks. ## Ming maritime projection and the curious retrenchment The Ming dynasty’s maritime experiments in the early fifteenth century dramatically demonstrated China’s capacity for oceanic presence. The treasure fleets under Admiral Zheng He, composed of enormous junks many times the size of contemporary European ships, sailed to the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and possibly as far as East Africa. These expeditions were vast diplomatic and commercial displays, aligning the Chinese empire with coastal polities and projecting soft power across the Afro-Asian littoral. What followed, however, is one of the great puzzles of global history: after a few decades of spectacular reach, the Ming court deliberately dismantled its oceangoing apparatus. Court mandarins and conservative literati, arguing that extravagant naval expenditure was wasteful and ideologically suspect, persuaded the emperor to halt and then withdraw support. The imperial navy withered, and China embarked on a period of relative inwardness — yet not impoverishment. The sixteenth to eighteenth centuries remained profoundly wealthy for China, fuelled by continued intra-Asian trade and an enormous inflow of silver that furnished domestic markets and imperial treasuries alike. ## European corporate power, opium, and the rupture of the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries European entry into East Asian commerce intensified from the sixteenth century onward, but the character of that entry shifted drastically by the eighteenth century. The European appetite for Chinese porcelain, tea, and other luxuries drove structural imbalances: silver flowed eastward in quantities sufficient to alarm European elites. The companies that serviced and protected long-distance trade — notably the British East India Company — were not mere commercial entities. They were state-sanctioned conglomerates with quasi-imperial authority: private armies, forts, and the ability to wage war in pursuit of commercial objectives. The resolution European operators found to the silver drain was grimly ingenious. Drawing on colonial resources, the British organized and industrialized opium production in Bengal and along the lower Ganges. Opium was then trafficked into China by private traders, creating demand and a means of payment that inverted the previous flow: instead of bullion leaving Europe for Chinese goods, a contraband narcotic became the commodity that paid for tea and porcelain. This trade, while profitable for the traffickers and the colonial state, produced cascading social costs in China and culminated in armed confrontations that broke the long-standing structures of trade. The Opium Wars and unequal treaties of the nineteenth century therefore mark not just a diplomatic rupture but an economic inflection point: European gunboat diplomacy forcibly restructured trading relationships and helped inaugurate an era of Western domination in East Asia. ## Revisiting narratives of discovery, neutrality, and dependency Taken together, the historical arcs discussed in the conversation complicate myths of European ingenuity and inevitable supremacy. China’s centrality in pre-modern global commerce means that Western ascendancy is better understood as contingent and contingent upon a set of technological, political, and military breaks — including the rise of Atlantic silver flows in the wake of the Americas, the militarized capacities of European states and companies, and the coerced integration of Asian markets by force. For

Historian Reveals 2000 Years Of Chinese Economic Power Today I’m talking to the Australian author and historian, Michael Pembroke. Michael is based in Sydney, has written several books and for various outlets, including Time Magazine, Al Jazeera, the South China Morning Post. He was also a Supreme Court Judge (2010–20) for Australia’s state of New South Wales. His most recent work came out this July and carries the title, “Silk, Silver, Opium: The Trade With China that Changed the World” Links: Silk, Silver, Opium: The Trade With China that Changed the World: https://www.amazon.com/Silk-Silver-Opium-Changed-History/dp/1761451987 Neutrality Studies Goods Shop: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com #M3 But the essential message is that China has been the dominant force in the global economy for most of the last 2,000 years, and that the last 200 years have been an aberration from that trend. #M2 Hello everybody, this is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm talking to the Australian author and historian Michael Pembroke. Michael is based in Sydney and has written several books and for various outlets, including Time Magazine, Al Jazeera, and the South China Morning Post. He was also a Supreme Court judge from 2010 until 2020 in the Australian state of New South Wales. His most recent work came out this July and carries the title Silk, Silver, Opium: The Trade with China That Changed the World. This is what we want to discuss today. So, Michael, welcome. #M3 Thank you, Pascal. It's a pleasure to be here. I've enjoyed your podcast for many months. #M2 Thank you very much. And I'm glad to have you here because you wrote this really good book and you tried to give a history of the trade China was engaged in. One of the nice things about your book is that you actually take China's perspective. You start off with all of the people who came to China and the experiences China had over the centuries, actually. You started with Mongolia, in fact. Can you maybe give us a little bit of background on why you take this perspective? #M3 -- 1 of 15 -- Well, the essential focus of the book is China's trade with the West. So although I mention the Mongols, of course, the trade started when the Silk Road carried silk and other exotic goods all the way to the Roman Empire. I start with Augustus, the first Roman emperor, who really encouraged and enlarged the trade, both overland across the Iranian plateau and also by sea. Under Augustus, Roman ships went out through the Red Sea and around the Arabian Peninsula to a port then known as Barbaricon, at the mouth of the Indus River—now closer to where Karachi is. Of course, under Augustus, Rome acquired Egypt, which was enormously wealthy, and that helped push the trade to great heights. But the problem, in one sense, was that the Romans were so exorbitantly wealthy and affluent, and silk was such a new, expensive, and exotic product—unlike anything they'd ever known before. They were only used to wool and linen and, of course, furs and animal skins. So the color and sensuousness of silk made Roman women—and some men—absolutely crazy about acquiring it at huge cost. They paid enormous amounts. They also wanted everything else they could get their hands on from China because it was so exotic and unusual. So the old men of Rome at the time— Seneca was one, but there were many—became very concerned about two things. One was the outflow of silver and gold from Rome's treasury to China, or to the traders who brought the goods from China. The other was the extravagant expenditure of valuable money and resources on what they regarded as frivolous products, just to make the Roman lady shimmer in public. #M2 Yeah, I mean, there are these eternal stories, right, of how human societies work. And one of the things is like, oh, I want something fancy to wear. But this is quite interesting, right, that already, like 2,000 years ago, this continental trade actually was—okay, maybe we shouldn't call it flourishing the way it is today—but the trade route was open, and the exchange between these empires was going on. Was it only gold and silver that flowed in the other direction, or were there other kinds of things that China actually wanted to buy from Europe? #M3 Not really, no. And it was mostly silver, not gold, because the Chinese preferred silver. It was more tradable; the gold was more valuable. And that was the story throughout the next decade—actually, 1,800 years. So China became known in due course as the graveyard of silver from the West. When the trade was at its height in the 18th century, Isaac Newton—Sir Isaac Newton—who, among many roles, was Warden of the Royal Mint in London, complained that the trade with China was so huge that it drained away all the silver of Europe. And Carl Linnaeus, a Swede—you'd know who he is, a botanist, but he was also a public intellectual who expressed opinions on lots of things and lived in London for some of his time. He said, sounding very much like President Trump, that there is nothing more important than to shut that gate to China through which all the silver of Europe goes. The trade was so huge that by the -- 2 of 15 -- middle of the 18th century, David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, said in 1750 that if China were as close to us as France, everything we buy would come from China. Now, that trade eventually, by the 19th century, diminished and petered out because of the conflict that occurred over opium. That's another story. I deal with that in several chapters towards the end of the book. #M2 Let's stick with this trade for a moment, but also with a question that I’ve had on my mind for a while, because your book makes this beautiful case: look, trade with China for the Europeans is basically as old as Rome. But in public discourse, there’s this whole idea that Marco Polo went around the world in order to discover China, and that discovering China—that reaching China—is something you need to do by sea. Why is it that there’s this myth that it was Marco Polo? Why is this guy so important when, in fact, the trade with China is so much older? #M3 Because after the Roman trade—and by the way, it wasn't two-way trade. As I said, the Romans didn't have much that the Chinese wanted. So the Chinese would take their camels to the west of China, over the Pamir Mountains, the Tien Shan, and the Hindu Kush. Then they'd cross the Iranian plateau. Sometimes they'd go south, down the Indus Valley to the mouth of the Indus River. But at each point along the way, the trade changed hands—the goods changed hands. There was a culture called the Sogdians in far eastern Central Asia, at the foot of the Pamir Mountains, and they were the best traders. Frankopan says they were very clever with money, and they managed the camel trade coming over the mountains from China, across Central Asia, across the Iranian plateau, and eventually to the Euphrates River, which was the eastern boundary of the Roman Empire. The Romans couldn't get further east because, as you probably know, the Parthians—an ancient Iranian Persian empire—blocked their way. The Parthians jealously guarded the trade from China and took their cut along the way, of course. And there's a wonderful story of a battle in 53 BCE between the Roman legionaries and the Parthians. The Roman legionaries encountered for the first time a cavalry troop of Parthian soldiers on horseback carrying silk pennants on long poles—colorful pennants. The legionaries had never seen anything like it in their lives, and they were completely mesmerized and concerned. The Parthians then surrounded the Roman legionaries, who huddled together with their shields above themselves, locked together in their testudo formation. And the Parthians showered arrows on them as thick as hail or rain, as was said by the historians of the day. The Parthian arrowheads were steel, manufactured according to Chinese techniques, which had not reached Rome. They were so strong that the arrows pierced the shields and pinned the soldiers' arms, legs, and other parts of their bodies. So it was a terrible slaughter. Sometimes the arrows went down and pierced their feet to the ground. That was what really revealed silk to the Roman soldiers, and then it started to dribble through in small quantities until, in fact, Julius Caesar— before Augustus (Augustus was his adopted son)—introduced silk at the Roman Forum one year, in -- 3 of 15 -- 46 BCE. He replaced the linen awnings which shielded the people, the plebeians, from the harsh sun, and replaced them with silk. And it was a staggering new development, which really was the beginning of the Roman craze for silk from 46 BCE for the next couple of centuries, until, as I said, Rome's treasury began to run out of resources. And, of course, a factor which contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire was the debasement of its currency. Its treasury had been depleted by sending all this silver—and some gold, but mostly silver—to China. Now, to get back to your question, there was no trade with the West until the Mongols. So the Dark Ages enveloped Europe. Then it was the Mongols in the 13th century who opened up Eurasia and the overland routes. #M2 Very belligerently, yes. Not because Europe wanted to open up, but because they just came. #M3 Yes. Golden Horde. That's true. So they opened up the overland route from Central Europe all the way to China. And it was said that they were good at commerce as well. They made the routes so safe that in the 13th century, you could travel from Europe to China for the first time, really. I mean, I'm not counting Rome as the same thing. And even from Rome, you were blocked by the Parthians. But you could travel from Europe to China quite safely. A Persian historian said that a virgin with a gold dish could travel unharmed from Europe to China. It was very well organized, with good roads and post stations for changing horses. And not only did merchants and travelers go all the way to China, but so did missionaries and representatives of the Pope. And believe it or not, the envoys of the Pope went all the way to the court of the Khan in China, and emissaries from the Khan—after initially rejecting Christianity and saying they should all submit to us—emissaries from Kublai Khan and later, went to Rome to pay their respects to the Pope. So that was around the 1250s, 1260s? No, later. The Mongol Empire, the Yuan Empire in China, was from 1271 to 1368, less than a century. And Kublai Khan was in that last period of the 13th century. But the most famous envoy from China was in the 1300s, around 1334, sometime like that. And when the envoys came from the Pope—and I think some at that time were coming from Avignon, not just Rome, or mainly Avignon, because the Popes moved to Avignon—they were greeted with all sorts of pomp and ceremony and formality in the court of the Khan. #M2 Right, right. This is one part of European history that we often forget about—the importance of the Mongols. And their reign wasn't that long, but they came all the way; they took Kiev. They took both -- 4 of 15 -- the north and the south. Yes, and defeated everybody along the way. And by doing so, they actually opened up the routes, right? And as long as you didn't challenge them, you could actually go back and forth. #M3 And there was a northern route through Ukraine, which went across Ukraine and Mongolia into China. The capital of the Great Khanate, the Chinese Khanate, was initially in what we would now call Inner Mongolia. It was later moved in the Ming Dynasty to Beijing by one of the Ming emperors. Right, right. #M2 So that is then the second flourishing of Chinese-European trade. The first one was during the Roman Empire, then the Dark Ages with very bad relations and everything in between, basically feudal principalities and blockades. And then it opens up because of a Pax Mongolica, or whatever we want to call it. Well, it's commonly call