● The Gold Standard at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Rising Powers, Global Money, and the Age of Empire
By Steven Bryan
Review via Economic Principles
A historian working for the moment in Tokyo as an attorney (Columbia Ph.D, Harvard Law J.D.), Bryan exemplifies a new generation of historians who cast a jaundiced eye on the market triumphalism of the 1990s. In The Gold Standard at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century: Rising Powers, Global Money and the Age of Empire, he argues that Argentina, Japan, Germany and other countries rose to power in the years before World War I following currency policies not all that dissimilar to China’s today. By adopting the gold standard, they were looking to lock in the most depreciated currency possible in order to promote industry and exports.
