Content area
Full Text
China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808-1856. By Man-Houng Lin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006. xxix + 362 pp. Illustrations, maps, figures, tables, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $49.95. ISBN: 0-674-02268-8.
Reviewed by Elisabeth Köll
The title of Man-Houng Lin's monograph, China Upside Down, refers to the silver-copper exchange crisis that occurred in the early nine-teenth century, with far-reaching consequences to China's economic, social, and political stability. China's economy was based on a bimetallic currency system, and the decline of the exchange rate between silver and copper remains a central point in the debate about the reasons for the erosion of China's economic and political authority, especially in the context of the opium wars. Lin's well-documented study opens with a discussion of the silver-copper-coin crisis and an examination of the role of silver in the economic life of the Qing empire. She then moves on to the monetary discourse and policies that emerged in response to the crisis, and concludes with a comparison of the various statecraft scholars, detailing the intellectual models and theories they proposed as solutions.
Because China's currency crisis extended beyond the country's boundaries, its ramifications were global as well as domestic. Lin disagrees with current interpretations of the event that blame British merchants' sale of Indian opium in China for the negative development of the silver-copper exchange rate, claiming that China was...