GROUNDED NETWORKS:
The Silver-Opium Connection
| Overview
Real War Grounded Networks The Plains Custom, & the Ports Nat Turner, & Others The Islands The Southern Slopes The Mission Coasts Control Networks Mills & Planters Silver & opium Alamán & Calhoun Rancheros & Pilots Removals The War of the South Siege & Contagion A Note on Then and Now What They Called "Civil War" Liberal Projects Conservative Demagogues Fight Scenes Grounded Reaction Outcomes, and Vision |
Many of the moneyed men of the 1830s understood the trade
connections that flowed from one part of the world to another, tying them
together. Few probably understood it all, or bothered to worry about
the moral implications of being a "network member." In any human sense,
any two competing merchants had hardly more "global vision" of the system
than did two peasant villages quarreling over property lines. But
the system was there.
The core of this system was the transformation of slave-produced raw cotton into fine consumer goods for the middle and upper classes of the West. After all, the silver and furs sent direct to China did not pay for all of the fine goods imported from China. And only a small part of the Chinese silks went to the wives of Southern slaveowners -- and none to the slaves. Simple two-way trade, like the exchange of tools from New England for furs from northern Mexico, was not enough to produce a world-wide pattern. We can visualize that pattern, though, on a schematic map that leaves out most of the simple trades: |
In the less sophisticated parts of the United States, and notably in the slave South and the new West, banks depended for their solidity on silver brought in from Latin America. This silver was paid for by cloth and other manufactures imported from the "developed" areas of the North Atlantic. In its turn, it became the base on which planters and farmers in the United States could leverage themselves up to participation in the world economy.
Two of the products that kept the system linked together were thus:
One aspect of the whole network was the effort by people to accept those
parts of European culture that they wanted for their own lives, and to
do this at their own pace, under their own control. Another aspect
was the
international flow of products as remote from each other as Mexican
silver and Chinese silk. At every point around this network, some
group was trying to appropriate as much as it could of the flow, and competing
groups often came into physical conflict. Santa Anna's attack on
Zacatecas in 1835 was an assertion of authority by his sector of Mexican
society, and one of many efforts to tap the flow through the international
network. This competition did not stop with his victory, nor with
that of the Texans the following year. It continued over the following
decade, and was a driving force in the ways many people tried to profit
from zones of exchange, throughout the world.
What made this pattern into a "system," on one side of the ongoing Real War, was not the fact of long-distance trade. That had long existed. Most people, in most communities of the world, were eager to trade with the rest of the world if they could do it on terms acceptable to themselves. Rather, the system was the set of institutions that bankers and hacendados and mine-owners used to impose terms on the network, from the top down. These institutions amounted to a fundamental strategy.
In relation to that strategy, the national armies of the period were something more than the buttons on the uniforms of a few vain officers They were an instrument for moving people from one situation to another, and a place for teaching people to accept discipline in large groups.
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