Silver monetary depreciation and international relations – DAMIN

The phenomenon of the silver crisis was mainly studied through a very small part of the European documentation. The approach is first to collect the maximum of data, from USA, Europe and Asia and to make it available. At the same moment we analyze this documentation and confront the analyses during Round Tables. The first Round Table was held at the École Normale Supérieure in January 2012. As the monetary question was a worldwide question, all the presentation were recorded and visible on the website. 4 other Round Tables are scheduled. The January Round Table was the kick-off meeting with confrontations on various approaches of the question. After this meeting, all the participants met in May 2013 in Paris, in May 2013 too in Madrid, and in April 2014 in Osaka. The next meeting will take place in May 2015 in Copenhagen. In the meanwhile, several bilateral meetings were organized to promote the program and to include new participants and cooperation. 40 volumes are already published, videos presentations of papers are on-line. PDFs are also available.

The researches are still on the way, however many volumes have been published. 4 round tables were organized by the program and the program also supported other conferences organized by participants. All the results, videos of the conferences, list of papers and volumes are on the site www.anr-damin.net.

The plan is to republish and analyze simultaneously the necessary documents for give the possibility to analyze and understand the monetery situation. In May 2013, two roundtables were held in Paris and Madrid, then in 2014 in Osaka and one is scheduled for 2015 in Copenhagen. About 20,000 values of gold and silver were collected and analyzed (from the London Stock Exchange and Shanghai). The roundtable organized in Madrid (with the support of the Casa de Velazquez) gave the possibility to have a confrontation between the historians of Latin America and from the United States where silver was mined. Colleagues in Japan (who organized the Osaka meeting in April 2014) work on the question of adoption of the monetary system in 1871, then the shift to gold in 1898 which was one of the reasons the increase of the world crisis. New Japanese documents were published.

More than 40 volumes published in the series Documents and Studies on 19th c. Monetary History created for the DAMIN program. The presentations at conferences in Paris, Madrid and Osaka, are video recorded and visible on www.anr-damin.net. All the basic documents are published in the Moneta collection www.moneta.be.

The axis of the work is the study of the depreciation of silver in the second half of the nineteenth century and its consequences in developed countries. We will study more specifically the differences between developed countries and Japan.
Japan after a period characterized by political and monetary fragmentation, adopted during the Meiji Restoration a mode of governance and a monetary system inspired by Western models that officials had been studying during trips.
The emperor decided at the same time to create a new currency and to centralize the issues, and to reform not only the monetary system, but also fiscal and financial systems. With the new unit of account, the yen, struck in silver, Japan adopted a quasi silver monometallism when overproduction devalued the value of silver. This depreciation was useful in Japan that imported abundant quantities of metal to create a monetary stock of coins to match its needs. The minting of these million of coins was made through the purchase of the mint of Hong Kong whose direction was left to the former English mint master.
After a period of inflation linked to disorders of the early years of the Meiji Masayoshi Matsukata came to government and worked to a monetary stabilization, the creation of the Bank of Japan (1882, inspired by banks in France and Belgium), then after the war against China by the adoption of the gold standard (1897).
So the history of Japan is a condensed history of European history: monetary unification, adoption of a silver coin, a change to the gold standard.
For this period, we have the books written by M. Matsukata regularly describing (in English) with details, the phases of currency reforms. We have also prepared documents for governments and economic actors in Europe and Japan. Finally, we have the Japanese official texts or local documents published in Japanese and English by or for the foreign traders.
These various books, justifications and comments, give us the possibility to compare with the situations in Europe, make this subject an excellent field of comparative study.

We intend here to collect documentation, to ensure the study and publication (in hard copy or internet).