Central Banks and Gold

Central bankers have enjoyed great power and autonomy. They have cooperated to construct and preserve towering structures of debt, reshaping relations of power and ownership around the world. In Central Banks and Gold, Simon James Bytheway and Mark Metzler explore how this financialized form of globalism first took shape a century ago.

Simon James Bytheway is Professor of Financial History at Nihon University. He is the author of Investing Japan: Foreign Capital, Monetary Standards, and Economic Development, 1859–2011. Mark Metzler is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter's Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle and coauthor of Central Banks and Gold: How Tokyo, London, and New York Shaped the Modern World,both from Cornell, and author of Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and The Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan.

This book opens a new door through which we can look at history from a non-Anglocentric perspective...[for] students of global or world economic history of the modern era.

"Their [Bytheway and Meltzer's] eminently readable book demonstrates the continuing value of archival research, including those archives that would seem to have given up all their secrets."

Bytheway and Metzler’s volume stimulates its readers to look more closely at the activities of central banks.... The book casts new light on the excep- tional role of Japan. The authors are persuasive in their argument that to understand and to evaluate today’s world economy, today’s financial globalization, it is imperative to include the important activities of the Japanese central bank and Japanese gold flows not only in contemporary times but in the period from 1896 to the start of the 1930s.

Engrossing.... This book is well written, clearly organized, and impeccably researched.... A fascinating read.

G. Balachandran, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, author of John Bullion’s Empire: Britain’s Gold Problem and India between the Wars:

This is an engrossing history of the origins of modern central bank cooperation by two leading financial historians of Japan. Mining a vast range of archival material, some for the first time, Simon James Bytheway and Mark Metzler trace the history of cooperation among the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and the New York Federal Reserve in the early 1900s. The authors deserve to be congratulated in particular for uncovering secretive diplomacy among the three central banks for a coordinated deflation of the world economy in the 1920s, and highlighting the significant Asian dimension missing from other accounts of central bank cooperation in this period when Japan was a crucial 'swing' power. Among this book’s strengths are its cultural insights drawn from banking relationships and biographies as Japanese and U.S. banking elites regarded themselves in each other’s mirror.

Masato Shizume, Waseda University:

Simon James Bytheway and Mark Metzler provide a new perspective on the work of central banks and the nature of money in the modern world. They illuminate the history of global credit creation, international policy cooperation, and the political economy of Europe, North America, and Asia by including Japan as an emerging world player alongside the commonly accepted North Atlantic alliance.

Shumpei Takemori, Keio University:

I greatly admire Mark Metzler for continuously shedding new light on modern Japanese economic history. Together with Simon James Bytheway, he has produced another smash hit, deciphering from historical archives the prominent role that Japan played in the pre–World War II global financial order.

Steven J. Ericson, Dartmouth College, author of The Sound of the Whistle: Railroads and the State in Meiji Japan:

Central Banks and Gold is a game changer. Simon James Bytheway and Mark Metzler convincingly upset conventional interpretations of many issues concerning international finance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with findings that have profound implications for global financial trends in recent decades.