Banks and the range of financial services that they provided were near-essential ancillary partners in the extension and consolidation of empire, formal or informal, in Asia and elsewhere. In recent years, their contributions to imperial rule and policies have won significant attention from historians, with international banks perceived as important agents of early globalization, functioning as crucial facilitators in creating an interconnected world. Yet many of the details of their operations remain unclear.

This provocative and stimulating collection of essays tells us much, but it raises more questions than it answers. A comprehensive introduction by Hubert Bonin—one of the most accomplished historians of French overseas business and banking—places Asian imperial banking history in the context of broader imperial banking networks, with ramifications extending into Africa, the Ottoman Empire, the Caribbean, and Latin America, as well as Canada and Australia. The volume is primarily a collection of empirical studies, focused on British, French, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Soviet, and Indian banking networks from the mid-nineteenth century onward, illustrated with a wealth of detail.

The essays in this volume deal with the roles played by financial institutions in the French Empire in Indochina and beyond; in the extension of, first, Russian and then Soviet power in Asia; in Russian, French, British, and Japanese attempts to win a major position in imperial and Republican China; and in India from the period of British rule until the present.

Certain themes run throughout the volume: the precise relationship between colonizing states and financial institutions—both indigenous and external—in the territories they sought to control; the links between colonial institutions and the metropole; how imperial banks in Asia dealt with competitors, whether local or foreign; and how governments and nationalist movements in the areas where they operated responded to their presence. As a whole, the various essays suggest there was no one simple or general pattern, but that, in each case studied, the picture varied according to specific circumstances.

Bonin, who has written extensively on the relationship between French overseas business and empire, gives an overview of French imperial banking. He describes how government-backed metropolitan institutions—above all, in Asia, the Banque de l'Indochine—provided the financial resources needed to underpin colonial militaries and governments, financed trade and investment, established central banking institutions to issue currency and stabilize the local economy, issued bonds and securities, and repatriated funds from the colonies to the metropole and elsewhere. Bonin highlights the degree to which French institutions in Asia, even as they established branches across much of Indochina, also collaborated on occasion with British and other banks and businesses—notably the prominent Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC)—pooling information and using each other's credit facilities. This replicated the pattern common across the European and American financial worlds, whereby different and supposedly rival firms nonetheless often worked together on specific occasions, not least when issuing securities, thereby spreading the risk as well as the profit.

Such arrangements suggest that, on the ground, economic considerations might well trump imperial competition—so too might the need to accommodate rising nationalist sentiment. Both forces were often, it seems, in evidence in Shanghai, the focus of no less than four essays in this volume. Niv Horesh focuses on the Yokohama Specie Bank, partly financed by the Japanese government, which opened a branch there in 1893, and HSBC. Both institutions had the right to issue banknotes that circulated within China, a privilege rescinded only in 1935, when the Republican government established the fabi currency. Well before then, however, nationalist boycotts targeting Japanese businesses in the aftermath of the May Fourth movement meant that use of the Yokohama Specie Bank's notes fell significantly. Tomoko Shiroyama explores the complex interlocking relationships between foreign banks, Chinese modern banks, and Chinese native banks in Shanghai through the late 1930s: in practice they worked together, with the Chinese gradually becoming the dominant players. Focusing particularly on the Chartered Bank in Shanghai, Man-han Siu tells a similar story.

Even in British-ruled India, comparable patterns can be seen. The establishment of the Reserve Bank of India in 1935 placed new restraints on the largely British banks that had until then dominated the foreign exchange market and monopolized much banking business. Indianization of banking would continue with the 1949 Banking Companies Act and subsequent amendments, as well as the nationalization in 1969 of fourteen prominent Indian banks. Since 1991, however, market liberalization has brought a new flood of foreign banks into India; adequate banking regulation ensured that they survived the late-1990s Asian financial crisis largely unscathed.

Russian and then Soviet banking was also a notable force in Asia. Describing the Shanghai operations of the Russo-Chinese Bank—established in 1895 with French and Russian backing to provide funding for the Chinese indemnity to Japan and to finance Sino-Russian trade and the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway—Kazuhiko Yago scrutinizes its workings in great detail. The same institution also features prominently in Sofya Salomatina's chapter on Russian and Soviet banking from the 1890s to the 1920s, a notable addition to the literature on Soviet policies. Tsarist financial institutions operating in Asia were, she argues, largely government-financed, their objectives political rather than economic, enabling them to absorb substantial losses as they sought—sometimes effectively through bribes—to further official Russian imperial policies in Asia. Salomatina's comprehensive account of Soviet banking operations in Asia in the 1920s breaks new ground in providing concise summaries of Soviet financial ventures in western China, Tuva, Japan, Iran, central China, Mongolia, and Harbin. Interestingly, in the 1920s the Soviets ultimately placed more emphasis than had their Tsarist predecessors on profit—perhaps a reflection of the New Economic Policy's preoccupation with developing reasonable lucrative ventures. It is abundantly clear that the Soviet economic and financial story is one about which much remains to be told.

Equally, the tale of imperial banking competition in Asia is, of course, far from over. In recent months, it has been impossible to ignore media reports of China's efforts to establish an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, an enterprise widely viewed as a counter not simply to the supposedly Western-dominated World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Asian Development Bank, but also to the U.S.-backed Trans-Pacific Partnership. Since 1945, imperial rivalry has been located not so much in nationally based or even multinational financial institutions—many of which are probably relieved to have eluded the pressures of national expectations and demands—but in international organizations backed by one or several great powers. How these continuing conflicts for power and influence between competing quasi-imperial states who consider each other major contenders for global hegemony will play out in contemporary Asia remains a fascinating and, at present, unresolved question.