Niv Horesh's book offers an overarching account of money across Chinese history, encompassing an impressive range of economic phenomena. The body of the book is a collection of case studies spanning the first millennium BCE to the present day. Horesh makes no pretense of comprehensiveness, and his analytical contribution lies primarily in his focused explorations—especially of the comparative development of paper money and of colonial and semicolonial banking in nineteenth- and twentieth-century East Asia. The individual chapters vary between synthetic treatments that rely heavily on very broad reading in secondary literature and more analytical studies in which Horesh digs deeply into primary sources.
With the first half of the book, Horesh takes up the history of Chinese coinage and paper money, starting with a broad view of the invention of coinage and then surveying monetary development up to the end of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Horesh gives appropriate attention to the unprecedented explosion of coinage production during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a central part of the commercial and economic changes that made China the world's leading economy in the medieval period.
By placing Chinese monetary history in a directly comparative context, Horesh makes an important argument about the emergence of paper money in both China and Europe, and he draws attention to the central role of military demands in the evolution of both Chinese and European paper money. He pushes aside the importance of precious metals in the origin of paper money and offers a multifaceted synthetic explanation of its invention and decline in China. In this instance, his account of paper money elsewhere in the world contributes to his global coverage but does not add much to his argument about Chinese monetary history.
The comparison with Europe, especially Sweden, highlights the effectiveness of Horesh's approach. Where European, particularly Swedish and British, paper money grew out of sovereign debt issued to finance wars, China's (much earlier) foray into paper money grew out of a need to supply frontier armies. The vouchers issued by the Song dynasty (960–1276) government created an incentive for merchants to transport grain and other supplies to border regions. These vouchers could then be exchanged in the capital for salt and luxury goods that merchants could sell in turn.
One feature of Horesh's work on both coinage and paper money is his attention to the technology and economics behind their production, in addition to questions of circulation. Technological concerns play a large role in the story he tells about early modern coin production, and his sensitivity to connections between technology and institutions enriches typical discussions of later monetary history. In a similar way, he shows how money is central to understanding the Great Divergence debate. His analysis reveals the role of coin output in a divergence between Chinese and European economic trajectories, reframing the narrative of global early modern silver flows.
With the second half of the book, Horesh brings the reader into the modern period, starting with an overview of paper money under the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) that argues it was not successfully used in most of China prior to 1900. Shifts to more stable bank notes and other paper-based credit instruments came in the ports most connected with East Asian commercial networks, and Horesh emphasizes the transnational elements of monetary development in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In a natural progression from his previous work on Shanghai business history in a transnational context, Horesh makes his most original contribution in two chapters on note issuance and banking between and among empires, with a focus on coastal China. The general thrust of this chapter is quite successful at demonstrating the importance of connections—correcting earlier interpretations that focused exclusively on one political unit. Horesh's method and argument are especially effective in chapter 5, where he mines bank and diplomatic archives to show meaningful and lasting effects of early twentieth-century Chinese responses to British politics. Social movements within China influenced British economic and diplomatic decisions; in turn, actions of the British treasury and colonial banks shaped the printing, distribution, and use of paper money in coastal China and beyond.
Horesh ends the main body of the book with a chapter on contemporary debates around the currency of the People's Republic of China, the renminbi. This final chapter jars somewhat, by its sudden chronological jump and its questions largely unconnected to the preceding content. Its generally optimistic account of the growing influence of Chinese currency could be taken with some skepticism. At the same time, this closing discussion allows the nuanced and chronologically deep frame provided by the bulk of the book to inform an understanding of present-day debates over money in all its roles.
Horesh has chosen his subtitle well. He advances our understanding of Chinese monetary history over a long span of time by emphasizing comparisons between China and the rest of the world, particularly Europe, and by looking for connections that linked China with Japan and Europe. The linked case studies that constitute the book all serve to reinterpret the history of money in China by identifying underappreciated connections. The resulting breadth of scope does sometimes give the volume a sprawling feel, and not all of the detail adduced advances his arguments, but the range of secondary literature Horesh brings to bear is impressive.
