Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870-1919

Ghassan Moazzin’s Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870-1919 is a fascinating study. My thanks to Mike Gow for indetifying the cover as the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank in Shanghai (1890)…

In this wide-ranging study, Ghassan Moazzin sheds critical new light on the history of foreign banks in late 19th and early 20th century China, a time period that saw a substantial influx of foreign financial institutions into China and a rapid increase of both China’s foreign trade and its interactions with international capital markets. Drawing on a broad range of German, English, Japanese and Chinese primary sources, including business records, government documents and personal papers, Moazzin reconstructs how during this period foreign banks facilitated China’s financial integration into the first global economy and provided the financial infrastructure required for modern economic globalization in China. Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China shows the key role international finance and foreign banks and capital markets played at important turning points in modern Chinese history.