Professor Kuroda toggles back and forth between high-level theory and multiple fascinating examples drawn from all around the world of how people used money in different places. In the 1930s people in the port of Yingkou in Liaoning Province simultaneously used copper coins, silver dollars, paper notes denominated in silver dollars, and Japanese banknotes; local merchants didn’t need currency because they settled their debts with one another directly in their shared account books. At nearly the same time, in December 1931, the only bank in the town of Tenino in Washington state, refused to honor deposits. The local Chamber of Commerce issued wooden currency with a face value of one-quarter of the deposits in the banks. And in Indochina the residents used zinc sapec coins as a superfractional currency.
Kuroda’s examples of the enormous variety of money cohere to make an extremely clear point: the prevailing view that money has followed a linear history from commodities to coins to paper money to electronic transactions is wrong (even if it follows the European experience to a certain degree).
The book focuses on three periods of major change in the use of money: 1300, 1600, and 1900. All who want to make sense of the history of money have to draw their examples from the entire world, just as Kuroda does in this compelling volume.
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2020
