Project Details
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FOR 596:  Monies, Markets and Finance in China and East Asia, 1600-1900: Local, Regional, National, and International Dimensions

Subject Area Humanities
Term from 2005 to 2014
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 13020509
 
Research carried out within this project will concentrate on the copper-based monies of Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, and late Choseon Korea. The focus is on the concrete conditions of coin production, starting from the mining and smelting of mint metals, their transport to the mints, to the casting of coins on the one hand, and on problems related to the functions and exchange rates of different means of payment, the structures of the financial systems as well as the cultural meanings of money on the other. On the basis of selected case studies these topics will be highlighted in their local, regional, national and international dimensions and interdependencies.
The Research Unit is composed of scholars in Chinese studies, Japanese studies, and geography from the universities of Tübingen, Heidelberg and Bochum, in close association with colleagues in economic history and comparative literature. The members of the Research Unit, together with the numerous national and international collaborators, will apply methods from a variety of disciplines, such as social and economic history, history of technology, history of literature and art, numismatics, geography, and econometrics.
In the course of the research work, massive bodies of mostly unpublished archival documents will provide a substantial and largely new empirical foundation. These consist primarily of Qing government reports concerning minting and mint metal transports, and documents from Japanese mines and Korean local archives. A variety of other types of sources will also be consulted and analysed, such as coins, illustrations and maps, fiction, drama, poems and jottings, travel reports, newspaper articles, and religious texts.
The Research Unit aims at contributing a new, empirically founded perspective on East Asian monetary history, supplementing the existing research on silver. Besides the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the production and transport of mint metals and coin output, the project will attempt to evaluate the organisational capacity and flexibility of early modern Asian states, illuminate the structures of cooperation and cooptation between the state and the private economy, and analyse perceptions of money, wealth, and poverty in East Asian and Western civilisations.
During the period of application this project was generously supported by the Ministry of Science, Research and Art of the State of Baden-Württemberg within its programme for the promotion of research.
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