*The Gold Standard at the Turn of the Twentieth Century*

The author is Steven Bryan, a historian, and the subtitle is Rising Powers, Global Money, and the Age of Empire.  This book offers a great deal of previous unpresented information on the operation of the gold standard in Japan, Russia, Turkey, and Argentina, based on original rather than secondary sources.  Here is a summary paragraph at the end of the book:

The connection between nineteenth-century great power politics, empire building, and militarism and the gold standard was obscured after World War I in the rush to reinstate the form of the gold standard while ignoring its substance and the varied rationales and motivations that had supported it.  Despite the rose-colored hues of nostalgia that flourished after the war, the gold standard did not exist in some magical land separate from the rest of the late nineteenth-century world.  For better or worse, the gold standard was as much a part of the age of empire as it was of the age of industry.

Here is the book's home page.  Here is the p.99 test applied to the book.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed