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Michael Schiltz analyses the efforts by nineteenth century banking to mitigate the effects of the depreciation of silver. He shows that strategies for hedging exchange rate risk were created earlier than traditionally thought, and explores the relationship between Great-Britain and its colonies in Asia, and the rise of Japan as a financial power.
List of contents
- Nomenclature; conventions; currency
- Dedication
- List of tables and figures
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1: Introduction: Liquidity, Hard and Soft Currencies, and Trade Finance
- 2: Silver Risk, Silver Exports, and Sovereign Debt in the Nineteenth Century: A Brief Reappraisal
- 3: Trade Finance in the Late Nineteenth Century: Accounting for Silver Risk
- 4: "On an Even Keel": Hedging Exchange Rate Risk on the Branch Network Level
- 5: Yokohama Specie Bank Flow-of-fund analysis: 1893-1908
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1: Construction of the Database and Methodological Issues
- Appendix 2: Exchange Banking: a Concise Japanese-English Glossary
- References
- Index
About the author
Michael Schiltz is Associate Professor at the Modern Japanese Studies Program at the University of Hokkaido. Before this he had a hybrid role at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, and was the digital preservationist and curator for a unique collection of historical stock exchange quotes hosted there. From 2011-2016, he was an associate professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo. Schiltz is the author of The Money Doctors From Japan: Finance, Imperialism, and the Building of the Yen Bloc, 1895-1937 (Harvard University Press, 2012).
Summary
Michael Schiltz analyses the efforts by nineteenth century banking to mitigate the effects of the depreciation of silver. He shows that strategies for hedging exchange rate risk were created earlier than traditionally thought, and explores the relationship between Great-Britain and its colonies in Asia, and the rise of Japan as a financial power.
Additional text
This is a serious work of scholarship about an important episode in global monetary history. An impressively researched book about the mechanisms and risks of payment systems in the golden age of globalization. Schiltz argues that the gold standard was the effect, not the cause, of the golden age of globalization. In the multi-polar trade economy of the late 19th century, exchange banks were key mediators — and risk mitigants - among the varieties of world currencies. Schiltz studies the adoption of the gold standard as a great risk shift that both disrupted existing financial institutions and changed the mechanisms by which this fundamental risk was mitigated.
