This monographic issue of the RHE-JILAEH presents new case studies in order to compare regions of Asia, Europe and the Americas through analysis of global demand for western goods in China (goods of European and American origin) as well as demand eastern goods (of Chinese and Indian origin) in Europe and the Americas. The global circulation of goods included accumulation of American silver in the hands of Chinese merchants and private institutions. Thus, this issue re-evaluates origins of the first globalisation during the 16th century, as opposed to the 1820s. Global trade networks and long-distance alliances in Asia, the Americas and Europe date back to the 16th century when Manila galleon routes were established.

New global history studies have provided theoretical models related to different paths of economic growth and consumer behaviour between East Asia (mainly China and Japan) and Europe during the period of the first industrialisation. However, more research challenging the Eurocentric views of the origins of globalisation is needed. In this article, I examine the exchanges of Chinese silks and porcelains and European wines and liquors for American silver through the Swedish Grill Company. This company had extensive business activities in Canton and Macao establishing strategic links and intermediation with other relevant companies from China, Manila, Seville and Marseille. On the global level, such exchanges played a crucial role for the accumulation of American silver in China during the Qing dynasty, and the outflows of Chinese goods to the Americas and Europe fostered market integration and globalisation that occurred earlier than 1820.

The important role of Chinese demand for silver in stimulating worldwide silver-mining and shaping the first truly global trading system has become commonly recognised in the world history scholarship. The commercial dynamism of China during the 16th-19th centuries was integrally related to the importation of foreign silver, initially from Japan but principally from Latin America. Yet the significance of imports of Latin American silver for the Chinese economy changed substantially over these three centuries in tandem with the rhythms of China's domestic economy as well as the global trading system. This article traces these changes, including the adoption of a new standard money of account—the yuan—derived from the Spanish silver peso coin.

Traditional historical literature has stressed a generalised crisis throughout the world in the 17th century. First proposed for Europe with its numerous dynastic, religious and state conflicts, it has now been expanded to include Asia and the Middle East as well. It was also assumed that there was a significant crisis in the Americas, a theme which until recently has dominated the traditional literature. The claim that there was such a crisis was based on a series of classic studies by Earl J. Hamilton, Chaunu and Borah, among others. But new research has challenged this hypothesis and we will examine both these new studies as well as offering our own research findings on this subject.

This article studies in a single conceptual framework the complex game performed by the different historical dynamics in the Taiwan insular area between 1624 –the time of the Dutch conquest of southwest Taiwan– and 1686 –the date of Taiwan's absorption into the Manchu Qing Empire, as a Fujian prefecture. It pays specific attention to the mercantile conflicts between Chinese Diaspora communities in concurrence with the Dutch and Iberians.

Silver coins were an excellent instrument of payment in the seventeenth century, but given its high weight and value, its use and transport involved high risks and costs. Is it possible to estimate those costs? So far, we know how much the Spanish Crown paid to its bankers for money transport, but how much did the bankers themselves pay? And how much did other economic agents pay? What was cheaper: the use of bills of exchange or that of coins? How did the export of precious metals work in Spain?

In the last decades of the sixteenth and the beginning of seventeenth century -that is, at the time Don Quixote was written and published-, an important change began in Spanish-muslim commercial relations. Removal of products, based on raids and plunders, thanks to north-African kings vassalage and subjection of tribes living on the coast, turned into mercantile interchanges completely normalized with those countries, impossible to be dominate. The importance and vitality of this trade is testified by the arrival of ships from Muslim countries, wheat imports from these and, last of all, American silver shipped to the quoted destinations.