This chapter analyses the evolution of finance and technology. In the modern era, we mark this in four major periods. The first focused on electrification and lasted for a century until the mid-to-late 1960s. It was dominated by analogue processes and traditional banks. The second period of digitisation was marked by digitisation, including across securities markets (NASDAQ), payments (ATMs, SWIFT), mass computerisation (financial calculators, PCs), communications (Internet, mobile), and lasted 40 years. From around 2007–2008 onwards, a new trend emerged as a result of the application of a range of new technologies to finance, combined with the impact of the 2008 GFC on finance and regulation. These three driving forces– the 2008 Crisis, the application of a range of new and transformative technologies to finance, and a massive increase in regulation globally in response to 2008 and a range of financial scandals– underpinned the emergence of FinTech, short for ‘financial technology’. This third period lasted just over 10 years and saw the rise of data, and its algorithmic analysis in a process called datafication which has transformed finance. The most recent era, driven by the COVID pandemic, commenced in 2020 and is characterised by the emergence of scale, in the form of large digital platforms.

Summary: This chapter connects findings from the book to broader issues in global economic history and comparative development. It summarises the role of region-specific ecology, the design and persistence of colonial institutions, and ineffectual market regulation in constraining rural capital markets in colonial and postcolonial India. This framework contributes to our understanding of three major economic forces. One is the role of climate in the development process, that risk of harvest failure from frequent weather shocks affected markets and inequality. The second is the relationship between property rights, courts and investment, a relationship that is more dynamic than previously thought. The third is the short- and long-term impact of targeted policies, and the path-dependent political ideologies that have determined how interventions were designed. The book’s contribution to each theme can be tested in preceding and succeeding periods, as well as positioned comparative global context.

This chapter provides a brief financial history of Hong Kong’s financial regulation and financial crises between 1841 and 1997. In the beginning, financial markets were subject to market-based regulation and the British colonial legal influence. Hong Kong took a long time to embrace financial regulation. The chapter argues that Hong Kong’s financial markets and the origins of financial regulation have developed, evolved, and shaped in response to a series of financial crises. Hong Kong underwent extensive market and regulatory change when the first modern banking crisis and stock market crash battered the economy between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s. The deposit-taking company and banking crises of the 1980s provided the impetus to develop the current regulatory and supervisory architecture. By 1997, subsequent regulatory reforms had shaped this architecture to resemble other developed financial centres, with the banking, securities, and insurance sectors having a designated supervisor and ordinance.

The Introduction provides an overview of the themes and arguments of the book. It first situates this book within the larger literature on foreign banks in modern China, the history of globalization and the history of international and multinational banking. It then presents the ‘frontier bank’ and the Chinese frontier as a conceptual framework for understanding the activities of foreign banks in modern China. Then it introduces the four main themes of the book: financial internationalization, transnational networks, the conflict between nationalism and economic globalization, and risk. Finally, the Introduction discusses how this book fits into larger discussions about modern China’s relations with the global economy, modern Chinese economic development and economic globalization. The Introduction concludes with an overview of the book’s chapters.

The book’s Conclusion returns to and reflects upon the arguments and themes of the book and explains the relevance of the book’s findings for our understanding of the history of foreign banks in modern China, the development of Chinese public finance and the Chinese economy, and modern economic globalization and multinational enterprises in China. The Conclusion also discusses why after 1914 we see a deterioration in the role of foreign banks in the Chinese economy. Finally, the Conclusion ends with a discussion of the return of foreign banks to China after 1978 and the role of these banks in the Chinese economy today.

The introduction describes the aims and approach taken in this book. This is a study of money as social technology in the early modern world, written from the vantage point of the Dutch Republic. It aims to view early modern money 'from the inside' by studying everyday practices of makers and users of money, especially in a rural society in the east of the Dutch Republic. It analyses how public institutions (through minters, assayers, and government officials) and private individuals (farmers, merchants, and accountants) interacted in the creation and maintenance of Europe’s system of currencies. The specific focus of this book is on accounting practices and practices of material scrutiny because they offer a key to understanding the internal logic of early modern money.

Chapter 6 chronicles how money as social technology was reconfigured during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examines economic and philanthropic discourse as well as government practice between 1750 and 1850 to explain the motives for a quick succession of currency reforms in the nineteenth century, that profoundly transformed the material properties of public money in circulation. Cheap but precise mass production was especially important in order to issue low-denomination coins, used primarily for wage payments and retail, that would be fully conversant with the official monetary standard. In order to explain why the Dutch came to take a more hostile stance towards multiple currencies circulating in their territory, the chapter delineates how a 'national economy', forged through monetary exchange, became first an ideological and then a bureaucratic reality. While national currency did not do away with plurality of money in use, especially in the Dutch–Prussian borderland that is the main locale of this book, the strong discourse of technological superiority of uniform, centrally managed currency made it more difficult to think about plurality as something other than chaos.

Chapter 1 develops the notion of money as social technology which carries the analysis throughout the subsequent, more narrative chapters. The vivid case of a clandestine Catholic congregation in the east of the Netherlands, which used money to restore its social and material fabric, is placed alongside insights drawn from scholarship about Chinese, African, and Pacific history. The core idea is that technology is a relationship between people, objects, and meaning. Technology refers to a technique exercised within a social context which gives meaning to both the maker and the made object. In the present case this means that an object is turned into money when makers and users make it fungible, that is, when they imbue it with qualities that allow it to be reliably exchanged for something else. This technological approach brings into focus how money objects bring forth and change social structure; and, conversely, where social structures are techniques that create and transform money objects.

Chapter 4 explores how artisanal knowledge helped sustain early modern monetary order by making and unmaking the intrinsic value of precious metal. Intrinsic value was a conceptual tool and a material practice that allowed people to collapse many coins into one another and to forge units from multiples. Effectively, this meant establishing a network of corresponding values between specific batches of coins. The papers of a family of assayers from The Hague offer a fine-grained picture of the processes involved. Small differences in the precious metal content of coins aroused creeping suspicion, anger, and even physical violence because it was believed that the metal of a coin reflected the mettle of a person. This was particularly true for the masters of the mint, whose reputation was tied to the reputation of their coins. Making coins, and making them work, involved financial and legal expertise, but the artisanal knowledge of assayers and other metal-workers was key. Their practices such as sampling, using high-precision balances and powerful acids, note-taking, the rule of three, and algebraic calculation allowed people to hold on to the convention that metals had an intrinsic, quantifiable value in spite of fluctuations in the price of silver and gold, both across time and across the globe.

Chapter 3 shows how stewards of the princes of Orange-Nassau employed a specific money of account, the Artois pound, to manage land, livestock, and corvée labour across the family’s fifty domains, one of which was the lordship of Bredevoort. The Artois pound was not minted as coins, and nobody in Bredevoort used it to make or receive payments. As an accounting convention, it only existed as ink on slips of paper and in bound volumes and thus required constant scribal labour to be valuable. The stewards’ trained eyes and hands parsed the multiplicity of Bredevoort’s coins, animals, grains, and labour into homogeneous money objects that had currency across the entire accounting system, but not beyond. As the chapter shows, such a system using homogeneous money was also imagined by the mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin, and while he failed to install double-entry bookkeeping in the domains of the Orange-Nassau family, the stewards shared his ideals of surveillance and profit. A series of instructions provided the script for the audit rituals that were performed year after year and that left their traces on the pages of the accounts.

Farmers and other rural folk are often pictured as distant from financial centres and invoked as the last groups to monetise their transactions during a long process of modernisation. By treating grain as money and by comparing barns to banks, Chapter 2 raises important questions about this accepted picture and about the boundaries of financial history as a discipline. This chapter explores how a community in the east of the Dutch Republic sowed, tended to, harvested, stored, and kept track of grain. People sustained the material integrity of grain, but more importantly, they also sustained grain’s ability to act as currency in social interaction. Volume measures, owned privately but calibrated by local authorities, were key for the monetisation of grain. Furthermore, the chapter introduces the notion of ink money, normally associated with urban merchants and bankers who made and unmade money by formal accounting, in order to make sense of farmers’ finance in the Dutch countryside. Unlike trade among merchants, where both parties could produce ledgers when challenged, farmers keeping accounts often dealt with illiterate people. These account books provide indirect evidence that day-labourers and smallholders could record and transact monetary value by way of mental accounting. This money was more precarious than its written counterparts, but could be validated by oral testimonial in local courts.

Chapter 5 examines taxonomic practices of merchants and other users of money to better understand how early modern coins worked in circulation. After-death inventories offer insights into people’s domestic taxonomies, that is, into practices of classifying, labelling, and compartmentalising the money that people encountered as they went about their lives. Mercantile and institutional account books show how people linked different currencies. Assayers’ conclusions, derived from testing tiny specks of matter, were disseminated widely in broadsheets, coin tariffs, and conversion tables, but also in privately collated notes and letters. This information allowed early modern people to relate coins to one another and to convert them into monies of account which were much more homogeneous. This work was more than merely coping with chaos. People’s ability to match coins with transaction types and geography marked out circuits for specific currencies. The spaces in which currencies like the Dutch guilder could circulate freely thus emerged from the ground up. Users’ taxonomic practices were just as crucial for upholding monetary order as the knowledge work performed by assayers, minters, and government officials.