This book contains some excellent studies in the history of international banking in Asia, written by eight specialists. Its main focus is East Asia, but several chapters explore connections with South and Southeast Asia. Most of the chapters are specialized studies, but other chapters help integrate a hitherto fragmented subject that needs integration. Altogether, it is a major step forward in the scholarship.

The book begins with three valuable introductory chapters, by the editors collectively, by Ranald Michie, and by Shizuya Nishimura. The main focus is British banking in Asia, mainly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though some contributors bring the narrative up to the present. Michie's chapter on the role of the City of London through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is especially wide ranging. Michie argues for London's persisting global financial centrality (and Tokyo's more marginal global position), on the whole convincingly, even if his account sometimes verges on boosterism. For instance, one gets the idea that it is all to the good that London holds the number-one share (37 percent) in global speculative trading totaling $5 trillion per day in foreign exchange; likewise, the number-one share (46 percent) in trading of $2.7 trillion per day in interest-rate derivatives (pp. 42–43; 2010 statistics). How much new money creation is involved in such trading, and who ultimately pays for it? What social and industrial distortions might be caused by this kind of financialization? Such questions are not hinted at here, but this is solid and well-presented scholarship, and there is much to be learned from it. Nishimura's essay covers some of the same ground but from a somewhat different point of view, serving to introduce his later chapter on the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC).

The specialized chapters begin with Toshio Suzuki's chapter on the little known history of the Oriental Bank Corporation, the first of the Eastern exchange banks and for decades the largest, until its failure in the crisis of 1884. Readers should also be alerted to Suzuki's excellent prior study of London's international bond market, which might be overlooked because it is contained in a book on Japanese overseas borrowing (Japanese Government Loan Issues on the London Capital Market 1870–1913, London: Athlone Press, 1994). Hubert Bonin's chapter discusses French banking in Hong Kong, and Kazuhiko Yago discusses the Russo-Chinese Bank, which was substantially funded by French capital. Takeshi Nishimura has contributed an excellent chapter on the role of the Yokohoma Specie Bank (YSB) in the raw cotton trade between Japan and India. Makoto Kasuya discusses the YSB's wider international network by reference to its London and New York offices. Simon Mollan concludes the volume with a summary of correspondent relations between Asian and British banks. Several of the specialized contributions speak mainly to specialist historians. Readers whose main interest is not in banking as such will need to come with their own questions; doing so, one may discover some important suggestions for further research.

A weakness of many traditional bank histories is that the writer's research questions begin and end with the institutional history of the individual bank itself. Most of the contributors to this volume are reaching beyond that limitation, but even here, several authors refrain from offering substantial conclusions while most avoid mentioning political history. This avoidance leaves a region of silence about the very nature of these international banks, the most important of which were parastatal formations or at least were linked to their home-country governments and central banks in ways that enabled them regularly to serve as state agencies. (The YSB, for instance, would be in the first category; the HSBC, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would be in the second.) Beyond this, thought needs to be given to what banks are (the answers vary historically and geographically); to how banks create means of payment, for whom and in what volume; and to the significance of banks in relation to larger economic and political questions.

More synthesis is thus needed. A next step, as several chapters in the volume touch upon, will be to explain the significance of the history of international banking in Asia in connection to questions developed in other domains of economic and political-economic history. These include, first, the dynamic growth of intra-Asian trade, as described in a series of studies by Kaoru Sugihara and others. Several contributors mentioned this question, but we need a systematic synthesis of the trade and finance stories. A second question area concerns the intertwined financial histories of Western imperialism and Japanese imperialism—the international banks were at the center of this process, as developed in work by Michael Schiltz (The Money Doctors from Japan: Finance, Imperialism, and the Building of the Yen Bloc, 1895–1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012) and myself. A final issue of ongoing significance is the question of the relationship, or lack of relationship, between international banking and the industrialization of the whole region. New work by Simon Bytheway (Investing Japan: Foreign Capital, Monetary Standards, and the Japanese Economy from Black Ships to Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) fills in some of this picture. In some of the most important cases, national industrialization took off precisely during the decades from the 1930s through the 1960s, which Michie identified as the period of a “retreat into national banking” (p. 39); this raises further questions about the nature and direction of new credit creation. One larger question that is developed in this volume, by Michie and others, concerns the history of international financial centers; this volume opens the way for further integrative historical research into this question also.