No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Goldbugs Go Global: The Philippines, China, and the Foundations of Development
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2024
Abstract
While historians have recently called attention to the racial assumptions that shaped the debates over monetary reform in either the colonial Philippines or China during the first years of the twentieth century, this essay analyzes the crosscurrents between efforts to “civilize” and “develop” Filipino and Chinese monetary systems. It first examines the history of the Philippine money question (1899–1903), revealing anxieties about the apparent attachment Native Filipinos and Chinese had to silver currency. U.S. colonial officials were ambivalent toward the Native Filipinos, seeing them as possibly teachable, but so-called silver savagism was seen as too deeply engrained in the Chinese community, making the Chinese appear as a threat to monetary stability. In the last section, the article turns to China, revealing how the outcome of the Philippine money question shaped how U.S. monetary experts approached their efforts to reform China’s monetary system. Throughout this process, U.S. colonial officials and monetary experts defined the Philippines and China (“silver countries”) and Filipinos and Chinese (“silver-handling types”) as overlapping objects of development. This analysis reveals how development was simultaneously an economic, racial, and imperial language.
- Type
- Article
- Information
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)
References
Notes
1 Commercial and Financial Chronicle, Feb. 8, 1902, 304; Conant, Charles, “The Currency of the Philippine Islands,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 20 (Nov. 1902): 47 Google Scholar; Kemmerer, E. W., “The Establishment of the Gold Exchange Standard in the Philippines,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 19 (Aug. 1905): 585 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 For a history of these exchange rate issues, see Lumba, Allan E. S., Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 49–50 Google Scholar.
3 Eichengreen, Barry, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 15–16 Google Scholar.
4 For the relationship between the gold standard and civilization, see Rosenberg, Emily S., “Foundations of United States International Financial Power: Gold Standard Diplomacy, 1900–1905,” Business History Review 59 (Summer 1985): 169–202 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosenberg, Emily S., Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bryan, Steven, The Gold Standard at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Rising Powers, Global Money, and the Age of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 18, 33, and 156CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital, 3–4.
5 The term “goldbug” often refers to Americans who supported the adoption of the gold standard.
6 This analysis builds on Lumba, Monetary Authorities, 49, 50, 54–57, which reveals anxieties about the relationship between money and the Chinese.
7 Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital, 4.
8 While the “Chinese Question” initially emerged in the gold fields of California and Australia, Mae Ngai emphasizes how the perceived threat the Chinese posed to white-controlled spaces was continually redefined in different historical contexts. See Ngai, Mae, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021), 4Google Scholar. For histories of Chinese exclusion in the colonial Philippines, see Jensen, Irene, The Chinese in the Philippines during the American Regime, 1898–1946 (San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1975)Google Scholar; Alejandrino, Clark L., A History of the 1902 Chinese Exclusion Act: American Colonial Transmission and Deterioration of the Filipino-Chinese Relations (Manila: Kaisa Para sa Kaunlaran, Inc., 2003)Google Scholar; Wilson, Andrew R., Ambition and Identity: Chinese Merchant Elites in Colonial Manila, 1880–1916 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Kramer, Paul A., The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 400–01 Google Scholar; Chu, Richard T., “Transnationalizing the History of the Chinese in the Philippines during the American Colonial Period: The Case of the Chinese Exclusion Act,” in Filipino Studies: Palimpsest of Nation and Diaspora, ed. Manalansan, Martin F. and Espiritu, Augusto (New York: New York University Press, 2016)Google Scholar and Lew-Williams, Beth, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 210–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 For the “silver-handling types” quotation, see Cowperthwait, John Howard, Money Silver and Finance, 5th ed. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), 22 Google Scholar.
10 For histories of monetary reform in the colonial Philippines, see Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World, 14–17; Nagano, Yoshiko, State and Finance in the Philippines, 1898–1941: The Mismanagement of an American Colony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 21–40 Google Scholar; Akiboh, Alvita, “Pocket-Sized Imperialism: U.S. Designs on Colonial Currency,” Diplomatic History 41 (Nov. 2017): 874–902 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lumba, Monetary Authorities.
For U.S. interventions in Chinese monetary debates, see Dean, Austin, “A Coin for China? The Monetary Standards Debate at the End of the Qing Dynasty, 1900–1912,” Modern China 44 (Nov. 2018): 591–619 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 For debates over the racial capacities of Native Filipinos to understand money, see Lumba, Monetary Authorities, 46–47.
12 On the discourse of civilization, see Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Since Bederman’s analysis, an increasing number of historians have begun to analyze the discourse of civilization in a U.S. imperial context. See Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World, 5; Kramer, Blood of Government; Merleaux, April, Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a historiographical analysis of the discourse of civilization in the American empire, see Enstad, Nan, “The ‘Sonorous Summons’ of the New History of Capitalism, Or, What Are We Talking about when We Talk about the Economy,” Modern American History 2 (Mar. 2019): 91–93 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 While scholarship on development has focused more on the Cold War era, historians have begun to locate the origins of the discourse of development in earlier eras, often seeing its roots in the discourse of civilization. For direct connections between the discourses of civilization and development, see Bowden, Brett, The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapter 8; and Ziai, Aram, Development Discourse and Global History: From Colonialism to the Sustainable Development Goals (New York: Routledge, 2016)Google Scholar, chapter 3. For an intellectual history of development, see Cullather, Nick, “Research Note: Development? It’s History,” Diplomatic History 24 (October 2000): 641–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Macekura, Stephen, “Development and Growth: An Intellectual History,” in History of the Future of Economics Growth, ed. Schmelzer, Matthias and Borowy, Iris (London: Routledge, 2017), 110–28 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a historiographical overview of development scholarship, see Macekura, Stephen J. and Manela, Erez, “Introduction,” in The Development Century: A Global History, ed., Macekura, Stephen J. and Manela, Erez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1–17 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Albert J. Beveridge, “March of the Flag,” Sept. 16, 1898, National Humanities Center, https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/empire/text5/beveridge.pdf (accessed Sept. 14, 2023).
15 For William McKinley quotation, see “Speech of His Excellency Manuel L. Quezon President of the Philippines Before the Maryland Bar Association,” Official Gazette (Baltimore), Jan. 16, 1943.
16 Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, 1791, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-10-02-0001-0007 (accessed Mar. 21, 2024).
17 Morgan, Howard Wayne, William McKinley and His America (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003), 335 Google Scholar.
18 Philippine Commission, Report of the Philippine Commission to the President, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900), 187 Google Scholar.
19 Andrew, A. Piatt, “The End of the Mexican Dollar,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 18 (May 1904): 321, 348CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Lumba, Monetary Authorities, 50.
21 Lumba, Monetary Authorities, 49–50.
22 Philippine Commission, Report of the Philippine Commission, 1900, vol. 2, 162.
23 Story, Russell McCulloch, “The Problem of the Chinese in the Philippines,” American Political Science Review 3 (Feb. 1909): 39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Philippine Commission, Report of the Philippine Commission, 187. This verbiage echoed the way white supremacists in the American South use their proximity to African Americans to claim racial expertise. See Prince, K. Stephen, Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 226 Google Scholar.
25 Philippine Commission, Report of the Philippine Commission, 1900, vol. 2, 17.
26 Philippine Commission, Report of the Philippine Commission, 1900, vol. 2, 187.
27 Philippine Commission, Report of the Philippine Commission, 1900, vol. 2, 17. This analysis builds on Charles F. McGovern’s notion of “material nationalism.” See McGovern, Charles F., Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 3 Google Scholar.
28 Regarding the perceived incapacity among Filipinos to understand the “market” value of money, see Lumba, Monetary Authorities.
29 Philippine Commission, Report of the Philippine Commission, 1900, vol. 2, 17.
30 Philippine Commission, Report of the Philippine Commission, 1900, vol. 2, 187.
31 Philippine Commission, Report of the Philippine Commission, 1900, vol. 2, 186.
32 In 1902, Congress extended Chinese exclusion laws by adding the Philippines and Hawaii as spaces from which Chinese could be excluded. While these issues of monetary stability did not serve as the primary driver of Chinese exclusion from the Philippine Islands, they informed the perceptions of the Chinese as “bad” or menacing occupants of the islands who had to be rooted out. See “Chinese Immigration and Chinese Exclusion Acts,” in Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations, Department of State, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/chinese-immigration (accessed Apr. 25, 2023).
33 Philippine Commission, Report of the Philippine Commission, 1900, vol. 2, 160.
34 “Financial Situation in Manila Alarming,” New York Times, Dec. 2, 1901.
35 Walker, Francis A., “The Quantity Theory of Money,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 9 (July 1895): 372 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Charles Conant expressed the basic principles of the Quantity Theory of Money. See Charles Conant, “The Plans for Currency Reform,” Bankers’ Magazine, Dec. 1906. The American economist Irving Fisher formalized the perception that prices rise when the supply of money expands in his famous “equation of exchange.” See Fisher, Irving, The Purchasing Power of Money: Its Determination and Relation to Credit Interest and Crises (New York: Macmillan, 1912)Google Scholar.
36 While the roots of the “money question” can be traced back to the late eighteenth century, when Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians were arguing over what kind of authority the U.S. government could or should have in the nation’s banking system, historians give the monetary debate in the 1890s—the famous “battle of the standards”—special attention because it was an important part of the broader Populist movement. For a recent history of the “money question” within the Populist movement, see Postel, Charles, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For histories that examine the money question in the 1890s more directly, see Livingston, James, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890–1913 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Ritter, Gretchen, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of American Finance in America, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O’Malley, Michael, “Specie and Species: Race and the Money Question in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review 99 (Apr. 1994): 369–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O’Malley, Michael, Face Value: The Entwined Histories of Money and Race in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wells, Wyatt, “Rhetoric of the Standards: The Debate Over Gold and Silver in the 1890s,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (Jan. 2015): 49–68 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Frieden, Jeffry A., Currency Politics: The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 104–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
37 For Conant’s concern about surplus capital and his theory of business cycles, see Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System, 76–78; and Sklansky, Jeffrey, Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chapter 6.
38 Conant, Charles, The United States in the Orient: The Nature of the Economic Problem (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900), 176 Google Scholar.
39 Conant, “Currency Problems in the Orient,” 280.
40 Conant, “Currency Problems in the Orient,” 283.
41 Conant, “Currency System of the Philippine Islands,” 47.
42 Conant, “Currency System of the Philippine Islands,” 50.
43 Conant, “Currency System of the Philippine Islands,” 53, 57–58.
44 Lindsay, A. M., Ricardo’s Exchange Remedy: A Proposal to Regulate the Indian Currency by Making it Expand and Contract Automatically at Fixed Sterling Rates, with the Aid of the Silver Clause of the Bank Act (London: Effingham Wilson & Co., 1892)Google Scholar. For a history of Indian monetary reform during this period, see Kaminsky, Arnold P., “‘Lombard Street’ and India: Currency Problems in the Late Nineteenth Century,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 17 (July 1980): 307–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
45 Jenks, Jeremiah W., Report on Certain Economic Questions in the English and Dutch Colonies in the Orient (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1902), 13 Google Scholar.
46 Jenks, Report on Certain Economic Questions, 21.
47 “Brings Report of Commission: Charles A. Conant Returns from Mission to Manila,” San Francisco Call, Nov. 17, 1901, 29.
48 “Coin for the Philippines,” Weiser Signal (Weiser, Idaho), Mar. 6, 1902.
49 “Congress and Finance,” New York Tribune, Feb. 17, 1903.
50 “Philippine Currency Situation,” Omaha Daily Bee, July 7, 1902. See also, “Philippine Currency: Congress Now Wrestling With a Difficult Subject,” Minneapolis Journal, Dec. 19, 1902.
51 Conant, “Currency System of the Philippine Islands,” 51; Kemmerer, “Establishment of the Gold Exchange Standard,” 586.
52 Kemmerer, “Establishment of the Gold Exchange Standard,” 586–87.
53 Henry C. Ide, quoted in Kemmerer, “Establishment of the Gold Exchange Standard,” 587.
54 Kemmerer, “Establishment of the Gold Exchange Standard,” 586.
55 Kemmerer, “Establishment of the Gold Exchange Standard,” 599.
56 Lumba, “Imperial Standards,” 620.
57 Lumba, “Imperial Standards,” 608.
58 Akiboh, “Pocket-Sized Imperialism,” 876.
59 Conant, “Currency Problems in the Orient,” 282.
60 “Gold Standard in the Philippines,” New York Times, May 12, 1903.
61 Conant, Charles, “Putting China on the Gold Standard,” North American Review 177 (Nov. 1903): 704 Google Scholar.
62 McCormick, Thomas, “From Old Empire to New: The Changing Dynamics and Tactics of American Empire,” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, ed. Scarano, Francisco A. and McCoy, Alfred W. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 77 Google Scholar. For a transnational history of how the British American Tobacco Company exploited China, see Enstad, Nan, Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
63 Smith, Arthur H., Chinese Characteristics (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1894), 132 Google Scholar.
64 Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 130.
65 Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 128.
66 Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 128.
67 Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 128.
68 On this concern for consumption in U.S. foreign policy, see Matthew Jacobson, Frye, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 36–37 Google Scholar.
69 McCormick, “From Old Empire to New,” 77. By “absence of modern economic infrastructure,” McCormick refers to “the absence of an integrated railroad network, the neglect of river and harbor infrastructure, and a system of internal tariffs that discouraged the movement of goods from province to province or region to region.”
70 These developed nations included Russia, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Japan, and the United States. “Settlement of Matters Growing out of the Boxer Uprising (Boxer Protocol),” Treaty Series 397, Sept. 7, 1901, 305.
71 Conant, “Putting China on the Gold Standard,” 693.
72 The Chairmen of the Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tientsin General Chambers of Commerce to Edwin H. Conger, Aug. 1903, in Commission on International Exchange, Stability of International Exchange: Report on the Introduction of the Gold-Exchange Standard into China and Other Silver-Using Country’s (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 252 Google Scholar, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001739178 (accessed Nov. 8, 2023).
73 Sir Robert Hart in the North China Herald, July 2, 1903, in Stability of International Exchange, 15.
74 John Hay to Theodore Roosevelt, Jan. 28, 1903, in Stability of International Exchange, 38.
75 Shen Tung to John Hay, in Memoranda on a New Monetary System for China ed. Jeremiah Whipple Jenks (Shanghai: Printed at the “North China Herald” Office, 1903), 1.
76 Tung to Hay, 2.
77 Tung to Hay, 3.
78 “Hugh H. Hanna,” Bankers Magazine 60 (Apr. 1900).
79 Rosenberg, “Foundations of United States International Financial Power,” 170.
80 “Considerations Regarding a New Monetary System for China,” in Commission on International Exchange, Gold Standard in International Trade: Report on the Introduction of the Gold-Exchange Standard into China, the Philippines, Panama, and Other Silver-Using Nations, and on the Stability of Exchange, ed. Hanna, Hugh H., Conant, Charles A., and Jenks, Jeremiah W. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 82 Google Scholar.
81 “Considerations Regarding a New Monetary System for China,” 82.
82 “Considerations Regarding a New Monetary System for China,” 83.
83 Conant, “Putting China on the Gold Standard,” 692.
84 Conant, “Putting China on the Gold Standard,” 692.
85 Theodore Roosevelt to Hugh Henry Hanna, Aug. 19, 1903, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library, Dickinson State University, www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record?libID=o185704 (accessed Jan. 29, 2022).
86 “The Work in China,” in Commission on International Exchange, Gold Standard in International Trade, 14–15.
87 “Work in China,” 14.
88 Lynn Chang, “The Monetary History of China, 1900–1940” (M.A. thesis, Boston University, 1951), 21; Dean, “A Coin for China?” 594–95.
89 Cohen, Benjamin J., The Geography of Money (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 49 Google Scholar.
90 Commission on International Exchange, Gold Standard in China and Panama. Google Scholar
91 This proposal was modeled after the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the United States, the first federal regulatory agency established by the National Currency Act of 1863, which oversees the national banking system. For a history of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, see Stiller, Jesse, “History of the Comptroller of the Currency,” Public Historian 16 (July 1994): 45–50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stiller, Jesse, ed. Banking Modern America: Studies in Regulatory History (London: Routledge, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
92 Kemmerer, Edwin Walter, “The Theory of Foreign Investments,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 68 (Nov. 1916): 3, 7Google Scholar.
93 Chang, “Monetary History,” 20–21.
94 McCormick, “From Old Empire to New,” 77. Political scientist Shogo Suzuki argues that Japan sought to join Europe and become a more “civilized” nation by engaging in imperial expansion, which led to the Sino–Japanese War. See Suzuki, Shogo, Civilization and Empire: China and Japan’s Encounter with European International Society (London: Routledge, 2009), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
95 Swisher, Earl, “Chinese Intellectuals and the Western Impact, 1838–1900,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 1 (Oct. 1958): 36 Google Scholar.
96 Dean, “A Coin for China?” 602–04.
97 Dean, “A Coin for China?” 593, 603.
98 Dean, “A Coin for China?” 608.
99 Prince of Ch’ing to Jenks, in Commission on International Exchange, Gold Standard in International Trade, 20.
100 George Ernest Morrison, “Professor Jenks’s Mission Ends—Chinese Government Impressed by His Gold-Standard Arguments,” London Times, Aug. 29, 1904, in Commission on International Exchange, Gold Standard in International Trade, 18.
101 Robert Little, “Currency Reform in China,” North China Daily News, Sept. 8, 1904, in Commission on International Exchange, Gold Standard in International Trade, 18–19.
102 Edwin Conger to the State Department, in Commission on International Exchange, Gold Standard in International Trade, 18.
103 Ngai, Chinese Question, 300.
104 For more on the dollarization of Panama, see Helleiner, Eric, “Dollarization Diplomacy: US Policy Towards Latin America Coming Full Circle?” Review of International Political Economy 10 (Dec. 2003): 411 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Helleiner, Eric, “Below the State: Micro-Level Monetary Power,” in International Monetary Power, ed. Andrews, David M. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 88 Google Scholar. For some of the political impacts of dollarization, see Kirshner, Jonathan, Currency and Coercion: The Political Economy of International Monetary Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 158–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These scholars move quickly from a 1904 monetary agreement between the United States and Panama and the full dollarization of Panama years later, leaving questions about how dollarization took form. Research on this topic could begin with Commission on International Exchange, Gold Standard in International Trade, 13; “Notes of Meeting with the Commission of Panama and the Secretary of War,” June [date uncertain], 1904, Between the Secretary of War and the Delegation from the Republic of Panama, in Hearings Before the Finance Committee of the United States Senate on the Monetary Agreement Between the Secretary of War and the Government of Panama, 59th Cong., Jan. 24 and Jan. 27, 1906, 24–26; Hearings before the Committee on Interoceanic Canal of the United States Senate in the Matter of the Senate Resolution Adopted Jan. 9, 1906, Providing for an Investigation of the Matters Relation to the Panama Canal, etc. 59th Cong., Jan. 11 and Jan. 16, 1906, 68.