Most scholars of China are already familiar with the critical role of silver in Chinese history. Its steady influx commercialized the economy starting from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644); its alarming outflow precipitated the First Opium War (1839–42); and its continued use kept China out of the gold standard during the twentieth century. Many commodities have undoubtedly reshaped China's history. Yet silver is unique in both the scale and the duration of its impact; few other commodities have transformed China so completely and for so long.

Despite the importance of this commodity, research on silver in Chinese history remains temporally unbalanced. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the early modern era, when China was the importer of global silver and “the tomb of European moneys.” Recent books such as The Silver Way by Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales and Baiyin Diguo by journalist Xu Jin (recently translated by Stacy Mosher as Empire of Silver) maintain this focus, as they are far more concerned with how silver connected China with the global economy in the early modern period.Footnote ¹ By contrast, scholars have focused less on the modern era, when China struggled to wean itself from its reliance on silver and reform its monetary system.

Austin Dean's China and the End of Global Silver thus offers an overdue corrective to this historiographical imbalance by retracing the unappreciated impact and enduring legacies of silver for modern China and the international monetary order. It is decidedly not a narrow numismatic history. Instead, it is a dramatic story of economic upheavals, diplomatic maneuvering, and imperial competition that writes silver into the very heart of Chinese and world history.

Silver, according to Dean, shaped modern China in numerous yet unheralded ways. It was, for example, key to state-building ambitions in the late Qing, when leading thinkers such as the official Zhang Zhidong and the merchant Zheng Guanying all recognized the centrality of the silver question in Chinese statecraft (chapter 3). During the late nineteenth century, the price of silver began its long decline relative to gold, and China found itself awash in foreign coins as countries around the world dumped their stocks or emptied their mines. The influx temporarily boosted the Chinese economy and increased government revenues, but it also sparked furious debates on whether China should take the unprecedented step of issuing a unified currency by minting its own silver coins. A more unified currency, according to some thinkers, would facilitate commerce by lowering transaction costs while protecting China's “economic rights” by enhancing official control over the money supply. Such plans never materialized for the Qing, since local officials ultimately took the lead in minting provincial silver coins as part of the Self-Strengthening Movement. Still, as Dean demonstrates, coinage reform did not merely touch on esoteric or technical issues; it was integral to the revitalization of the beleaguered dynasty and questions surrounding modern Chinese statecraft.

China and the End of Global Silver embeds silver within the history of modern China, but it also widens its panorama by linking the Chinese story with the broader story of global monetary politics. Conventional narratives of monetary history usually focus on the worldwide shift to the gold standard in the late nineteenth century and mention—in passing—China's increasingly anomalous position as the world's only major country that remained on the silver standard. By choice or by circumstance, China stood outside a monetary club that conferred an array of benefits such as favorable financing and national prestige on its members. Yet, as Dean argues, exclusion was not necessarily the same as marginalization. Indeed, even as the gold standard dominated international finance, China always remained on the minds of politicians and bankers around the world. During the late nineteenth century, as the United States moved away from bimetallism, for example, American officials struggled to unload all the surplus silver unearthed in the west (chapter 2). They eventually pinned their hopes on the vast Chinese market, expressly minting a silver dollar for export and expecting that China would absorb all the surplus silver. (It would not.) Later in the early twentieth century, China retained this outsize role in global finance as its increasing debt burden from foreign indemnities made currency reform an ever more urgent issue for both China and for the rest of the world. Indeed, scores of foreign advisors, diplomats, and bankers made their way to Beijing (and later Nanjing), trying to persuade Chinese leaders on the wisdom of competing financial restructuring plans (chapters 4 and 5). Once again, Dean illustrates how the silver question was not just a domestic story but also a global story.

The continual courtship of Chinese leaders to various monetary schemes also highlights the surprising ways in which China stood at the nexus of imperial competition (chapter 6). China was already too big to fail in the minds of the global policymakers and bankers of the early twentieth century. This importance was only magnified after the First World War badly damaged the gold standard and the Great Depression sounded its death knell. As the global economy fragmented during the 1930s, China emerged as the preeminent prize in the monetary great game. Different powers vied to help China reform its currency and thereby fold the Chinese economy into their respective currency blocs. For the United States, addressing the silver question in China not only placated domestic interests but held the promise of displacing Great Britain as the leading financial power in East Asia. For Japan, reorganizing Chinese finances kept China within its sphere of influence while tightening economic integration with newly seized territories like Manchukuo.

After engaging in some delicate diplomacy, the Nationalist government finally enacted monetary reforms by abandoning the silver standard with American support and issuing a new currency—the fabi (chapter 7). The adoption of the fabi marked the end of an era. It represented the culmination of Chinese efforts to create a unified currency, but—more significantly—it also ended the centuries-long reliance on silver as the mechanism linking China to the world economy. Thereafter, silver no longer stood at the center of Chinese and global monetary debates.

China and the End of Global Silver draws from a laudably diverse set of materials from Chinese, American, and British archives. It also employs a valuable global perspective connecting China to broader currents. By placing silver and monetary debates at the center of its narrative, it casts new light on old narratives of Chinese state building, Sino-foreign relations, and the fitful creation of the international monetary order. This expertly researched book boldly addresses big questions, and it should appeal to Chinese, American, and economic historians who want to link seemingly disparate but intimately connected developments in modern world history.