The Cash Trade: How Copper Coins Circulated between Qing China, Tokugawa Japan, Nguyen Vietnam, and Dutch Southeast Asia in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Xiaoyu Gao, University of Chicago

Drawing on Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, and English sources, this paper examines how diverse economic institutions—states, companies, and merchants— jointly constructed the copper-cash market that linked East and Southeast Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While existing scholarship on transnational currency flows primarily emphasizes silver, I argue that the circulation of copper cash was equally decisive for monetary order and commercial growth. Since the twelfth century, copper coinage had become the principal specie for daily transactions across China, Japan, Korea, Java, Bali, the Philippines, and the Indochinese Peninsula. By the eighteenth century, an interconnected copper-cash zone stretched across these regions. Under the Qianlong reign (1735–1795), the Qing Empire produced an average of three billion good copper coins annually. Meanwhile, Tokugawa Japan, drawing on substantial domestic copper resources, also cast copper cash in large volumes. This abundance supplied not only domestic economies but also Southeast Asia with badly needed small-denomination currency. Geopolitical shifts in the late eighteenth century, however, transformed the regional monetary landscape. The Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (1780–1784) disrupted VOC remittances and intra-Asian shipping, creating acute shortages of small coin in the Dutch East Indies. In response, the VOC and colonial authorities legalized and actively encouraged imports of Chinese and Japanese cash. In the nineteenth century, Southeast Asia’s soaring population and ensuing commercialization—Java and Madura alone grew from 4.5 million in 1815 to 28.4 million by 1900—further amplified demand for daily small currency. To meet this need, not only the Dutch colonial government but also overseas Chinese companies issued copper coinage. Meanwhile, as Daoguang Qing (1820-1850) struggled to produce good copper cash, South China turned to large-scale imports of Japanese and Vietnamese coins. In the mid-19th century, Nguy?n Vietnam became another major source of copper cash for both China and Southeast Asia.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 66. State and Business Institutions in Early Modern China