When considering the adoption of a monetary policy (hard versus floating peg) and its respective economic rationale (wiping out transaction costs? lowering costs associated with foreign borrowing? overcoming original sin?), one often forgets that monetary policy is made on a level of social organisation that is as much characterised by legal, political and technical (procedural) constraints as purely economic ones. As a consequence of such clustering, constraints should be considered as more than simply cumbersome impediments to be eliminated in order to enhance economic efficiency. Instead, they are fundamentally persistent and conducive to the recreation of any economic-institutional set-up and, by extension, co-responsible for the latter's evolution. Put differently, institutions and their innate constraints are serious business and one would make a mistake by neglecting to study them. This insight forms the backbone of Nishimura et al.'s Origins. It is underlined in the introduction (pp. 1-12), in which the editors endorse the importance of transcending the concern with macroeconomic efficiency when dealing with a topic like exchange banks. Transaction costs, we are reminded, do exist and institutions with a stake in the latter (exchange banks make a living out of insuring exchange risk) have strong incentives to recreate and perpetuate them. Hence one finds before 1914 a complex web of interconnection that simultaneously maximised the sources of credit available and ensured ‘its distribution around the world despite the existence of different currencies’ (p. 1; italics mine). This begs a bit more context. Although Origins addresses an important topic that has largely been neglected in economic history, it does not exist within a research vacuum. As a matter of fact, it connects to a quite novel strand in the literature that engages with macroeconomic questions by drawing attention to institutional technicalities, the microfoundations indeed of economic reality, of which international trade finance is only one aspect. In one example: through its attention to the role of financial centres (and peripheries), Origins draws attention to a school of thought that was arguably formed by historians such as Jaime Reis (see, for instance, Reis Reference Reis2005 and Reference Esteves, Reis and Ferramosca2009) and Marcello de Cecco, and which was recently further developed by Ogren and Oksendal (Reference Ogren and Oksendal2012). It also points to other quantitative developments. The informed reader will find that the existence and the cooperative competition between international banks in East Asia provide an answer to the apparent puzzle of a sub-bloc of Asian countries quoting each other's currencies – a phenomenon first discovered in Flandreau and Jobst's network analysis of the international monetary system for the period before 1910 (Reference Flandreau and Jobst2005: 997), and considered exceptional for the time. (The notion of intra-Asian trade itself has been documented by Japanese historians such as Kaoru Sugihara (Reference Sugihara2005), Takeshi Hamashita (Hamashita, Selden and Grove (Reference Hamashita, Selden and Grove2008)) and others.) As is the case with all edited volumes, the quality of the papers tends to vary, but I found the general quality of the individual contributions to be very high. Origins is characterised by an amount of integration and unity of argument that is much stronger than one finds in most edited volumes. Although papers focus on institutions that were geographically and managerially quite distinct, the authors clearly share one research agenda. This is not an amalgam of chapters indulging in historical and biographical specifics. Instead, the authors coherently focus their discussion around two questions: what roles did different types of banks play in different regions?, and what is the importance of financial centres in international financial relations? In order to put these questions in context, the book opens with a chapter by Ranald Michie (he became co-author as Youssef Cassis was unable to fully participate). This is a long chapter, which can be best characterised as the gist of all of Michie's earlier work on the role and workings of the London money market. As said, the chapter frames the book not as a treatment of international banks in Asia per se, but rather as their necessary complement: the large monetary and financial infrastructure that has been the city of London. Michie's intuition that what really mattered is liquidity (as expressed as the bid-ask spread of a certain currency, in this case the British pound) is sound, as demonstrated by the empirical work of – again – Flandreau and Jobst (Reference Flandreau and Jobst2009). He demonstrates that London was able to innovate and reinvent itself and its liquidity, notwithstanding the turmoil that is innate in modern capitalism. The following chapters concentrate on macroeconomic and microeconomic challenges that confronted the management of several banks at the time, and how they managed (or not) to overcome them. Shizuya Nishimura's contributions (chapters 2 and 4, on respectively British international banks in general and HSBC in particular) go beyond all former studies (I obviously think in particular of Frank King's massive four-volume history of HSBC, published in 1986–7, and which several reviewers have correctly criticised for being digressive). Its explanation of the technicalities of international trade finance around the turn of the twentieth century is simply excellent, and throws light on the often misunderstood notion of ‘even keel’, the subtitle of volume I of King's official history, but never quite explained in the latter.

Personally I found Toshio Suzuki's chapter on the history of the Oriental Banking Corporation (OBC) the best and most original contribution. OBC's archives got destroyed, so it must be considered a veritable tour-de-force to gather all possible (primary and secondary) sources, and furthermore make it into an almost dramatic story: Suzuki finely weaves together the ‘fall of silver’ with the rise of the telegraph in order to demonstrate how both conspired to result in the demise of the once mighty OBC. One only has to think of other, if very few, analyses (in English, I know of only one paper, by the late John McGuire) to realise that this is historical fact-finding at its very best. The other chapters of the book present a finely calibrated balance of case studies of particular international banks and their experience in China. Hubert Bonin's chapter on the Comptoir d'Escompte gets lost in excessive detail, but this may have to do with the destruction of this bank's archives as well: maybe the author sought to make up for that loss by processing as much of the information available. The remaining contributions are prime examples of the advanced nature of Japanese scholarship in the field of business history. Kazuhiko Yago's paper on the Russo-Chinese bank turns to a topic which most readers (including myself) will be completely unacquainted with; its attention to the book-keeping technicalities is impressive, although I found myself rather puzzled at certain points in the discussion. Three chapters on the Yokohama Specie Bank (YSB) (by Makoto Kasuya and Takeshi Nishimura) are especially timely, as the bank's archives were only opened recently (they are currently kept at the Resources and Historical Collections Office of the Library of the Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo). They update earlier Japanese scholarship, of which earlier work by Tomoyuki Taira and Masanao Ito must be considered the most representative. All in all, this is a very fine and valuable book about a clearly under-researched topic. Apart from some overlaps and repetitions (especially between the chapters by Nishimura), Origins will be appreciated by business historians, scholars of Asian history and those interested in the history of imperialism and globalisation.