Description
Book SynopsisCentral bankers have enjoyed great power and autonomy. They have cooperated to construct and preserve towering structures of debt, reshaping relations of power and ownership around the world. In Central Banks and Gold, Simon James Bytheway and Mark Metzler explore how this financialized form of globalism first took shape a century ago.
Trade ReviewEngrossing.... This book is well written, clearly organized, and impeccably researched.... A fascinating read.
* Choice *
This book opens a new door through which we can look at history from a non-Anglocentric perspective...[for] students of global or world economic history of the modern era.
* American Historical Review *
Bytheway and Metzler’s volume stimulates its readers to look more closely at the activities of central banks.... The book casts new light on the excep- tional role of Japan. The authors are persuasive in their argument that to understand and to evaluate today’s world economy, today’s financial globalization, it is imperative to include the important activities of the Japanese central bank and Japanese gold flows not only in contemporary times but in the period from 1896 to the start of the 1930s.
* JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC LITERATURE *
"Their [Bytheway and Meltzer's] eminently readable book demonstrates the continuing value of archival research, including those archives that would seem to have given up all their secrets."
* Journal of Japanese Studies *
