Research on the monetary and financial history of modern Asia has surged in recent years, and the region is no longer the blank space it was in the international monetary histories of a generation ago. Nonetheless, these research results have yet to be incorporated into most accounts of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century globalization. Moreover, as elsewhere in the world, historians have given most attention to the gold standard; there has been much less exploration of how the gold standard operated as part of a larger monetary ecology. Questions involving the interworking of gold and silver standards were especially salient in Asia, where most standard money (for long-distance trade, for banknote issue) was silver at the beginning of the period, where silver became the basis for modernized unitary currency systems in several countries, and where silver persisted as the standard of the largest country, China, until 1935. Other connected questions come to light here. What was the role of money creation in imperial projects, particularly the invention and regional salience of gold-exchange standards, in which silver remained the mainstay of circulation? What was the role of Asian monetary flows and reserves in stabilizing the London-centered world monetary order (and in destabilizing Asian economies and societies at several decisive moments)? Finally, how did the international gold and silver standards work together as a single system, from the time of their conjoined origins in the 1870s to their conjoined demise in the 1930s? Panelists approach these questions by examining regionwide macro-level effects of the first great appreciation of gold after 1873; Japan’s first, unsuccessful attempt to adopt a gold standard after 1871 (which would have made Japan a very early gold-standard adopter); Japan’s successful adoption of a silver standard and central banking system in the 1880s; the mediating role of exchange banks between the gold and silver standards; the silver standard in China compared with the silver standard in Mexico; the Kemmerer mission to China and its attempt to institute a gold-exchange standard there; the long contestation over colonial currency transitions; synthetic commentary on some lessons of these experiences.

Panelists:

Gopalan Balachandran, Professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, is the author of _John Bullion’s Empire: Britain’s Gold Problems and India between the Wars_ (London, 1996/2015); _The Reserve Bank of India, 1951-1967_ (Delhi/Oxford, 1998); and _Globalizing Labour? Indian Seafarers and World Shipping, c. 1870-1945_ (Delhi/Oxford, 2012).

Simon James Bytheway, Professor of Financial History at Nihon University, is the author of _Investing Japan: Foreign Capital, Monetary Standards, and Economic Development, 1859–2011_ (Harvard, 2014), and co-author (with Mark Metzler) of _Central Banks and Gold: How Tokyo, London and New York Shaped the Modern World_ (Cornell, 2016).

Steven J. Ericson, Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College, is the author of _The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan_ (Harvard, 1996) and co-editor of _The Treaty of Portsmouth and Its Legacies_ (Univ. Press of New England, 2008). He is currently writing a book on the Japanese financial reform of the early 1880s.

Marc Flandreau, Howard Marks Professor of Economic History at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of _The Glitter of Gold: France, Bimetallism and the Emergence of the International Gold Standard, 1848-1873_ (Oxford, 2004); _The Making of Global Finance 1880-1913_ (with F. Zumer; OECD, 2004); and _Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange: Science, Empire and White Collar Criminality in the Age of Victoria_ (Chicago, 2014).

Niv Horesh, Visiting Professor in China Studies at Durham University, is the author of _Shanghai’s Bund and Beyond: British Banks, Banknote Issuance, and Monetary Policy in China, 1842-1937_ (Yale, 2009), and of _Chinese Money in Global Context: Historic Junctures Between 600 BCE and 2012_ (Stanford, 2013).

Mark Metzler, Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Washington, is the author of _Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan_ (California, 2006) and of _Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter’s Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle_ (Cornell, 2013).

Tomoko Shiroyama, Professor of Economic History at the Graduate School of Economics of the University of Tokyo, is the author of _China During the Great Depression: Market, State, and the World Economy, 1929-1937_ (Harvard, 2008). She is currently co-editing a volume on _Intra-Asian Trade and the Rise of Regional Economy during the Long Nineteenth Century_.