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Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870-1919
In this wide-ranging study, Ghassan Moazzin sheds critical new light on the history of foreign banks in late nineteenth and early twentieth century China, a time 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.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published July 28, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 9, 2022
Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of... oops, got off to the wrong start there.
One of my unusual hobbies is collecting corporate histories of banks from around the world. I have and have read about 300 of them. Despite the broad title, this is essentially a corporate history of Deutsch-Asiatische Bank, which was formed by the German banking industry to serve their customers in China shortly after the formation of the Second Reich.
As a corporate history, it is quite competently done. I would have preferred more statistical quantification of their profitability, leverage and business mix, but the story rings true. In fact, if you added 100 years to the date and changed the local to East Africa or Indonesia, it would be just as plausible. Frontier banking hasn't changed all that much over the years as the recent corporate history of Standard Chartered published earlier this year demonstrates.
However, it is the historiography of the book that fascinates me. Evidently, current academicians believe in a naive Eurocentric way that Victorian era bankers had no agency in relationship to their imperial governments and that the Chinese mandarins had no agency in negotiating with Western bankers. So, the entire interaction of western financiers with the Chinese Empire was just straight oppression, predation and exploitation in the service of greater colonialism.
Not surprisingly, Moazzin is able to demonstrate that Chinese bureaucrats are good at negotiating. And that businessmen in a capitalist system are more interested in making money than in following government direction. Anyone with any knowledge of how the world works today would assume that people four generations ago were equally smart and motivated, but apparently the current politics of academic research demands victims and villains and is unwilling to allow any agency to anyone.
To my astonishment, Moazzin's competent exposition of what should be apparent to all is necessary.
One of my unusual hobbies is collecting corporate histories of banks from around the world. I have and have read about 300 of them. Despite the broad title, this is essentially a corporate history of Deutsch-Asiatische Bank, which was formed by the German banking industry to serve their customers in China shortly after the formation of the Second Reich.
As a corporate history, it is quite competently done. I would have preferred more statistical quantification of their profitability, leverage and business mix, but the story rings true. In fact, if you added 100 years to the date and changed the local to East Africa or Indonesia, it would be just as plausible. Frontier banking hasn't changed all that much over the years as the recent corporate history of Standard Chartered published earlier this year demonstrates.
However, it is the historiography of the book that fascinates me. Evidently, current academicians believe in a naive Eurocentric way that Victorian era bankers had no agency in relationship to their imperial governments and that the Chinese mandarins had no agency in negotiating with Western bankers. So, the entire interaction of western financiers with the Chinese Empire was just straight oppression, predation and exploitation in the service of greater colonialism.
Not surprisingly, Moazzin is able to demonstrate that Chinese bureaucrats are good at negotiating. And that businessmen in a capitalist system are more interested in making money than in following government direction. Anyone with any knowledge of how the world works today would assume that people four generations ago were equally smart and motivated, but apparently the current politics of academic research demands victims and villains and is unwilling to allow any agency to anyone.
To my astonishment, Moazzin's competent exposition of what should be apparent to all is necessary.
October 1, 2026
Never thought I would read about book about Sino-German banking practices. It was fascinating regardless. Moazzin pushes back, convincingly, on the simplistic view of Sino-Western relations in this period as Imperialists/Victims. His focus on Chinese agency and the cycle of cooperation and compromise backs up his claims.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews