"Sea Coin and Shell Coin" author Yang Bin thanked the video.
Tribute
Sea shells were originally the object of marine biology research, but they were salvaged from the ocean of time and space by historians, giving them a new meaning. As a symbol of wealth and power, the ancient aristocracy flocked to it and transported it thousands of miles. The obsession with seashells connected the world's earliest communication networks. Before gold and silver currencies dominated the world, haibei also played a pivotal role in global trade as shell coins, creating the first world monetary system in history. Through the sea shells, we get a glimpse of the grandest panoramic view of civilization in human history.
We pay tribute to "Haibei and Shell Coin", pay tribute to its historical writing of "to the vast and subtle", and pay tribute to the author's insight as a historian to explore the subtle. This book's analysis of the sea shell and the shell coin redefines the meaning of money from a historical perspective, and also allows us to re-examine the meaning of global trade. The desires and pursuits of human beings, the exchange and estrangement of civilizations, the excitement and suffering of the times, like the thin waves and waves on the sea, the sea shells in the book become the compass that guides the direction, leading the reader to the depths of the sea of history. Just as pearls are hidden in sea shells, the power to rewrite human civilization is often contained in the commonplace of ordinary things.
Thank you
"Haibei and Bei Coin: Little-known Global History" was selected as the "2021 Beijing News Annual Reading Recommendation", which was a surprise that I could not have imagined when I wrote. This is an unusually grand book, thousands of years up and down, spanning five continents and crossing three oceans. But it has been loved by the judges of the Beijing News, and I think it is not because of its grandeur, but because of its logic. Based on the history of money, the book presents a colorful picture in different time and space through maritime history, and finally summarizes the internal logic of the rise and fall of sea shells within the framework of global history, recreating a common trajectory of mutual interaction and transcending boundaries constructed by different societies based on a trivial marine life. Arguably, this book is an attempt to break through the traditional paradigm of historiography. Is the book an award, or is it an affirmation of the possibilities of global history?
——Yang Bin
Yang Bin, Zhejiang Jiande Ren, Ph.D. of Northeastern University, Professor of The Department of History, University of Macau, Member of Xiling Printing Society, Visiting Scholar of Harvard Yenching Society.
This book
Beijing News: In China, there are also some articles and treatises on the study of sea shells, but it is more of a research object of marine biology, and most people's understanding of sea shells is only limited to marine life. We wondered how you chose sea shells as the object of study of global history. Is this related to your personal experiences and hobbies?
Yang Bin: The study of Haibei has nothing to do with my personal hobbies, but it did start because of my research. When I was a Ph.D. student at Northeastern University in the United States, I chose to study Yunnan. In the summer of 2000, I went to Yunnan to do a preliminary investigation and found that Yunnan was not close to the sea on all sides, but actually used sea shells as currency, which aroused my high interest. When I returned to Boston in August 2000, I told my supervisor, Professor Patrick Manning, who immediately drew a book from the bookshelf and said that the slave trade in West Africa also used sea shells as currency. Later, Haibei and Bei coin basically formed a chapter of my doctoral dissertation, discussing the key links in Yunnan's integration into China from the perspective of monetary and economic transformation.
We know that in pre-Qin China, especially during the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, archaeology found many sea shells, and the oracle bones, especially the Jin wen, recorded frequent "shell-giving" rituals. According to the textbook view, these sea shells came from the South China Sea or the southeast coast and are the earliest currency in China, which I also accepted in my doctoral dissertation. However, as I deepened my research, I felt that these views lacked evidence, and they were not reliable. So in the years that followed, I synthesized the findings and research of archaeologists and wrote articles pointing out that neither literature nor archaeological material could prove that the source of these sea shells was the South, nor was it enough to prove that their function was currency. On the contrary, the literature, especially archaeology, points to the Indian Ocean as the ultimate source of the Central Plains sea shells; these sea shells played a unique and indispensable role in the politics, economy, and religious culture of the Shang and Zhou society, especially in the feudal relations between the Zhou Tianzi and the princes; although they assumed some monetary functions, they were not yet money.
In addition to sea shells in Yunnan and the Central Plains, Sanxingdui has also found a large number of sea shells. Like indian, Southeast Asian and West African sea shells, these sea shells originated primarily from the Indian Ocean, mainly from the Maldives archipelago. Since they come from the same source, can their different experiences and roles be integrated into a global framework? This is my original intention and ultimate goal in writing Haibei's book. So, after more than a decade of hesitation, I finally decided in 2017 to write a book about its key contribution to the World Economy in the Old World from the perspective of the seashell trade to how it became (including how it didn't) become currency, and how the new European colonialism used the accumulation of shell coins to shape the "Rise of the West", and how the customs and institutions of the old continent were abolished. Thus, the seashell is a symbol and metaphor for the colonized Asian and African populations.
Beijing News: In the museum, we can often see the excavated sea shells in the Paleolithic and Shang Zhou period exhibits, and the museum's docents will tell us that the sea shells were used as currency at that time, but you pointed out in the book that the sea shells were not money at that time, which shook our understanding of the concept of money. How did you find this?
Yang Bin: It needs to be explained here that the public's understanding of money is often from the perspective of wealth. Therefore, in daily life, sea shells are money, and it is not a big mistake. However, economists have a relatively clear definition of the concept of money. Traditionally, a substance needs to have three functions, namely the scale of value, the means of circulation, and the means of storage, in order to become money, that is, we call money, in ancient China, the sea shell is a scarce thing, has a high value, that is, a symbol of wealth, in some gold records it is still a scale of value. Therefore, it is not surprising that many of the square characters with shells as the head of the side are related to wealth. But that's not enough to prove that seashells are currency. In fact, the sea shell did not become a means of circulation in the Shang and Zhou dynasties, so although it assumed part of the function of money (value or wealth), it was not yet money.
Beijing News: With the theme of sea shells running through the entire global history, we may be able to call it "micro global history". I'd love to know what tips, methods, and lessons you learned when you conducted this research?
Yang Bin: This is a very macroscopic study, and it is indeed very difficult. Although the sea shell is small, it has been up and down for thousands of years, spanning five continents and crossing three oceans. I put a lot of thought into the structure of the chapters throughout the book. Basically, I still write in the chronological order of the expansion of the sea shell from the Maldives, but the problem of the sea shell is not limited by the territory of the regions or countries we are familiar with, so I try to emphasize its cross-regional connections, development, context, especially the internal logic. Moreover, one of the shortcomings of world history or global history that is criticized is its grandeur, grandeur and therefore lightness. This is the place I'm trying so hard to overcome. Many years ago, in my correspondence with Jerry Bentley, the deceased predecessor of world history, I said that world historians must not only look farther than regional historians, but also dig as deeply as they do. Therefore, when outlining the global trajectory of Haibei, I try to use archaeology, archives, travelogues, codes, etc. from all over the world, and use solid local materials to tell global stories. Some readers said that the book was very well written, and I was very happy to hear it, because I did try to tell a lot of stories about sea shells, such as how the young people who went to India to pan for gold in India used sea shells to get rich, the sea shells that were shipped from Ryukyu to Jiangnan in the Ming Dynasty, and the plans of a gold digger in California to write to his brother in Shanghai to make ceramic shells and sell them to Indians to get rich. In short, these need to be well planned. After all, historians must be able to tell stories, and writing interestingly does not dilute or diminish academic value.
This year
Beijing News: For 2022, what new research plans and ideas do you have?
Yang Bin: 2022 may be the most fruitful year for my Chinese. There are currently four publishing plans, three manuscripts have been delivered to publishers, and a fourth is scheduled for delivery in March. The first book, which some readers may have noticed, is that Oracle Studios will publish a global history of mine, tentatively titled Nezha, Volcano, and Ambergris. This book is my knowledge and practice of global history. "Knowing" is the theory, that is, my understanding of global history: "doing" is practice, that is, some of my research on global history. The second book is Jao's five years of teaching at the University of Singapore (1968-1973). Rao Zongyi's life and scholarship have been studied a lot, but in the past five years, all the research has been only one or two paragraphs, the language is vague, and there are many fallacies. My book is an attempt to reconstruct his disappearance for five years. The third book is about Yu Dafu's emotions and writing, and re-explores many of Yu Dafu's issues, such as his relationship with celebrities Hu Shi, Lu Xun, Xu Zhimo, Lin Yutang and others, his marriage with Wang Yingxia, and the doubts of third parties. The fourth book is based on my essay editing in the "surging" maritime history column "Between 'Man' and 'Sea'", and tries to look as good as possible on the basis of popularizing ocean China.
In addition, in the past two years, I have completed an English manuscript, which roughly discusses China's exploration of the Indian Ocean and the formation and transmission of Indian Ocean knowledge during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties. The story of Zheng He's seven voyages to the West in the early Ming Dynasty is very familiar to everyone, and this book focuses on China's activities in the Indian Ocean during the Song and Yuan Dynasties, which is also the basis and platform for Zheng He to go to the West. In addition, how the exchanges between China and the Indian Ocean after Zheng He's voyage to the West is another focus of the book.
Written | Lee Shane
Editors| Zhang Jin and Luo Dong
Proofreading | Xue Jingning