Austin Dean

This project investigates the global history of money minting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with a specific focus on efforts to create a standardized silver coin in China that would be accepted by count rather than weight. It seeks to provide new perspectives on the power of the Chinese state in the 19th century, how political leaders and ordinary citizens tried to understand and exert control over globalization as well as the links between money, modernity and nationalism. This project examines the most basic of human interactions: the frictions involved in the moment of exchange when one party parts with goods and the other with money and how states came to exercise more control over this exchange in the late 19th century.