The Institute for Chinese Studies presents "Sino-U.S. Relations: New Perspectives" series:
"China and the End of Global Silver, 1873-1937"
Austin Dean
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
with commentator:
Steven Conn
Miami University
Abstract: In the late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using silver. Yet China had no unified national currency; there was not one monetary standard but many. Silver coins circulated alongside chunks of silver and every transaction became an "encounter of wits."
China and the End of Global Silver, 1873–1937 focuses on how officials, policy makers, bankers, merchants, academics, and journalists in China and around the world answered a simple question: how should China change its monetary system? Far from a narrow, technical issue, Chinese monetary reform is a dramatic story full of political revolutions, economic depressions, chance, and contingency. As different governments in China attempted to create a unified monetary standard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the United States, England, and Japan tried to shape the direction of Chinese monetary reform for their own benefit. Austin Dean argues convincingly that the Silver Era in world history ended owing to the interaction of imperial competition in East Asia and the state-building projects of different governments in China. When the Nationalist government of China went off the silver standard in 1935, it marked a key moment not just in Chinese history but in world history.
Austin Dean is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He published China and The End of Global Silver, 1873-1937 with Cornell University Press in 2020. His next book project is a biography of the economist and population theorist Ma Yinchu (1882-1982).
Steven Conn is W.E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University, specializing in American intellectual, social, and cultural history. His scholarship has made significant contributions to the fields of urban history and public history. His books include Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools (Cornell University Press, 2019), Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Do Museums Still Need Objects? (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Free and Open to the Public (registration required)
Registration for the in-person lecture is limited to 15 attendees due to reduced room capacity related to COVID-19 concerns. Anyone not able to attend in person is welcome to join the event online.
If you require an accommodation, such as live captioning, to participate in this event, please contact EASC at easc@osu.edu. Requests made at least two weeks in advance of the event will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet requests made after this date.
This event is supported by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant to The Ohio State University East Asian Studies Center.
