Articles

Financing Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in Thailand

Panarat Anamwathana, Gregg Huff

Pages 1-28

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0968565021000202

This article analyses Thailand's place in Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and how Japan financed its goal of integrating the kingdom into the sphere. Financial arrangements to incorporate Thailand in a yen bloc go well beyond finance to reveal Japanese attitudes and policy towards the Co-Prosperity Sphere. In Thailand, Japan's use of ‘special yen’ created near open-ended Japanese purchasing power. Japan could obtain whatever resources it could ship home but provide Thailand almost no goods in exchange. Although in response to Japanese demands the Thai government printed large quantities of money, prices rose not too much faster than monetary expansion. Thailand, unlike most of wartime Southeast Asia, avoided hyperinflation. It is argued that principal explanations for this economically unexpected stability were Thailand's particular economic structure and the behaviour of Thai peasants.

A complicated puzzle: spinsters, widows and credit in Sweden (1790–1910)

Matteo Pompermaier

Pages 29-51

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0968565021000160

This article aims to retrace the extent of single women's engagement in the credit market. To this end, it relies on a series of more than 1,900 probate inventories drawn up between 1790 and 1910 in the two Swedish cities of Gävle and Uppsala. These two cities represent an ideal case study, because the process of industrialisation and economic development resulted in two differently structured credit markets. The research centres initially on the problem of studying women's agency from probate inventories. It analyses the main characteristics of spinsters and widows as they emerge from the sources and compares them with married women. Subsequently, the article analyses how marital status shaped women's economic lives, affecting how they participated in the credit market. For this purpose, it focuses specifically on banking and peer-to-peer exchanges (in particular, promissory notes). Spinsters favoured more conservative strategies relying more often on the services provided by banks, while widows seemed to have played an additional, and more significant, role as lenders in peer-to-peer networks. The study also confirms that unmarried women were only rarely active as borrowers.

Gold rush: the political economy of the Yugoslavian gold exchange standard

Aleksandar Radan Jevtic

Pages 52-71

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0968565021000172

This article analyses the economic, political and cultural factors that influenced the decision of policy-makers in Yugoslavia to join the gold exchange standard in the midst of the Great Depression in June 1931. The analysis proceeds in three stages. First, the economic reasons why policy elites and interest groups endeavoured to adopt the gold exchange standard are examined by looking at debates in Yugoslavia's central bank, correspondence between governmental institutions and the views of policy elites as depicted in various economic newspapers. Subsequently, the article analyses how the beliefs in economic benefits analysed in the previous part were formed, considering the state of economic knowledge in the country, as well as pressures exerted by foreign lenders such as the Bank of England, the Banque de France and the Bank for International Settlements. The third part analyses reasons for legal stabilisation that go beyond economic rationales, considering how the government employed the prestige involved in legal stabilisation for its political agenda, and how cultural attachments to ‘gold core countries’ made sharing their monetary system a matter of cultural integration.

The 1783 proposal for a readymade note at the Bank of England

David M. Batt

Pages 72-97

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0968565021000123

This article analyses the 1783 proposal to issue readymade notes to the Bank of England's private banking customers. Prior to 1783, I argue that there were two broad categories under which the Bank issued its notes into circulation: (1) notes which were issued to government in relation to the Bank's role as facilitator of the fiscal revenues of state, and (2) notes which were issued to its private banking customers. The readymade note was a form of paper money which the Bank had previously been issuing only to government and, unlike the notes which the Bank originally issued to its private banking customers, was made out in advance of its being issued into circulation. I argue that the transformation suggested in the 1783 proposal was made possible by the unique relationship which the Bank had always had with the government, and I will make three observations based on identifying how this transformation took place.

The Bank of England's profits across 300 years: wars, financial crises and distribution

Mike Anson, Forrest Capie

Pages 98-119

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0968565022000038

We have produced a series on the Bank of England's profits from its foundation in 1694 to the present time. This has not been available before. We explain the path of these profits over more than 300 years and account for their changing pattern. We next examine from where the profits derived, first in ‘normal times’, and then seeking, in particular, the impact of wars and financial crises. Other questions are: how much derived from seignorage; to what extent were profits passively acquired? Finally, we examine what the distribution regime was, and if, and how, that changed. This becomes more interesting in the period after nationalisation with some surprising results.