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market wide open. It was the perfect opportunity for the Japanese, who stepped in to take China’s place in the porcelain export business and for a brief period were able to dominate the European market. Kakiemon-style production expanded swiftly in response to European taste, creating new shapes, sizes, designs and, above all, colours, adding brilliant reds and yellows to the traditional Chinese blue and white. Europeans bought them in large quantities and, eventually, began to copy them. By the eighteenth century, Germany, England and France had all started to produce their own homegrown ‘Kakiemon’. So, in one of those bizarre and unpredictable twists of history, the first porcelain to be imitated by Europeans came not from China but from Japan.

The agent for all this, driving innovation both in Europe and in Japan, was the world’s first multinational – the Dutch East India Company, with its unparalleled concentration of resources, contacts and experience. From their magnificent new headquarters in Amsterdam, the merchants and administrators of the Company operated an ocean-spanning trading operation that for nearly a century would dominate the commerce of the whole world.

Japan was at this point being run by the Shoguns, who in 1639, to strengthen their control of the country closed off contact with the outside world. The Japanese kept open just a few carefully managed ‘gateways’, especially the port of Nagasaki, and there they allowed a few privileged states to conduct business. These states included Korea and China, and just one European partner – the Dutch East India Company. This exclusivity allowed the Company to transport Japanese porcelain to Europe in ever-growing quantities, and, as a monopoly supplier, they could charge high prices and make very large profits. The first substantial shipment from Japan, for example, arrived in Holland in 1659 and contained 65,000 items. Our elephants certainly came to Europe on a Dutch East India Company ship.

The British Museum’s Kakiemon elephants tell a story of the whole world in the seventeenth century. Japanese craftsmen, although cut off from the outside world, were using techniques borrowed from China and Korea to make images of animals from India, to suit the tastes of purchasers in England, mediated by the Dutch through the first trading company with a truly global reach. It is a fine example of how the continents of the world were for the first time being linked together by ships and by trade. This new world now needed a functioning means of exchange – an international currency. The next chapter describes what underpinned these early years of worldwide commercial activity: silver, mined in South America, minted into Spanish pieces of eight and exported to the world – the first global money.

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Pieces of Eight

Spanish coins, minted in Potosí, Bolivia

MINTED AD 1573–1598

Money, advertisers assure us, will let us buy our dreams. But some money, and especially coins, is already the stuff of dreams, with names that ring to the magic of history and legend – ducats and florins, groats, guineas and sovereigns. But none of those can compare with the most famous coins of all – pieces of eight. Familiar in books and films from Treasure Island to Pirates of the Caribbean, they carry with them a freight of associations – of armadas and treasure fleets, wrecks, battles and pirates, the high seas and the Spanish Main.

But it isn’t just thanks to Long John Silver’s parrot that pieces of eight are the supreme celebrity among world currencies. For the peso de ocho reales, the Spanish piece of eight, was the first truly global money. It was produced in huge numbers, and within twenty-five years of its first minting in the 1570s it had spread across Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas, establishing a global dominance that it was to maintain until well into the nineteenth century.

By modern standards a piece of eight is a large coin. It is about 4 centimetres (1.5 inches) across and has a good weight – roughly the same as three £1 coins. This particular coin is a