The book’s Conclusion returns to and reflects upon the arguments and themes of the book and explains the relevance of the book’s findings for our understanding of the history of foreign banks in modern China, the development of Chinese public finance and the Chinese economy, and modern economic globalization and multinational enterprises in China. The Conclusion also discusses why after 1914 we see a deterioration in the role of foreign banks in the Chinese economy. Finally, the Conclusion ends with a discussion of the return of foreign banks to China after 1978 and the role of these banks in the Chinese economy today.

Chapter 2 explores the entry and activities of the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank in the Chinese banking sector on the China coast. More generally, it explores the role foreign banks played in China’s banking sector, including their role in financing China’s foreign trade, and the relationship and interaction between foreign and Chinese banks. The chapter shows that, unlike what is often claimed by previous literature, the relationship between foreign and Chinese financial institutions was not one of one-sided domination but interdependence. The final part of the chapter explores the development of the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank’s business during the 1890s and the growing internationalization of the Chinese banking sector during the same period.

Chapter 5 looks at the 1911 revolution in China, which brought an end to China’s Qing dynasty, and explores the role foreign financial markets and bankers played during the revolution and its aftermath. The chapter first explores the impact the outbreak of revolution in October 1911 had on China bonds traded on foreign bond markets. It then discusses how foreign bankers in different ways attempted to maintain China’s credit abroad. Turning back to China, it then traces how both the Qing dynasty and the revolutionaries tried to obtain foreign financial assistance. Finally, the chapter shows how, after maintaining China’s credit on foreign bond markets, they financially supported the newly inaugurated Chinese republic and eventually floated the large Reorganisation Loan in 1913 to keep the new government afloat.

Chapter 3 explores the growing role foreign banks and global capital markets played in Chinese public finance during the 1890s. It does so by focussing on the indemnity loans China issued on foreign bond markets between 1895 and 1898 to repay the war indemnity imposed on China by Japan after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894/5. The chapter shows how increasing competition among foreign financiers and banks involved in China made it possible for China to borrow money cheaply abroad. However, once China’s Customs revenue was used up as a possible security for loans, foreign bankers needed to learn about other Chinese revenue streams and China eventually had to give in to the rules of foreign financial markets when it issued the final indemnity loan. More broadly, the indemnity loans also reflected the growing internationalization of Chinese public finance.

In Chapter 4, the book turns to the involvement of foreign bankers and financiers in Chinese railway development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the chapter focusses on the loan negotiations for the financing of the railway connecting Tianjin in northern China and Pukou in China’s south between 1898 and 1910. These loan negotiations were mainly undertaken by representatives of German and British financial groups in China and Chinese officials. By exploring the interaction between these foreign and Chinese negotiators, the chapter highlights the important role the ’contact zone’ and transnational networks played on the Chinese frontier in the foreign financing of Chinese railways. The chapter also shows how Chinese negotiators exhibited substantial agency within such transnational networks and were able to win very favourable loan terms. More generally, the chapter shows how these transnational financial networks reflected the development of financial globalization during the early twentieth century, connecting local officials in China with markets and individual investors in Europe.

Trust, shame, and the reputational credit contract

When I started to observe participants in the elaborate arena of social and economic practices that constitutes the reputational economy of debt in the north Indian city of Banaras, two correlated features became visible almost immediately. The first was the accessibility of many of the people involved, in spite of the extra-legal and at times even straightforwardly illegal character of the financial practices they partook in. The second was the apparent lack of details in the information I learned from speaking to debtors compared to what I managed to learn from creditors. Let me begin by discussing the first of these features. Markets depend on information flows. They are, in fact, embedded in information flows. Narges Erami and Arang Keshavarzian (2015) have highlighted the difference between a criminal market and a bazaar in their study on the latter's involvement in smuggling activities in post-revolutionary Iran. The criminal market, in this example, needed to rely on information flows that were clandestine, thus compromising the availability of robust knowledge on who was involved in dealings, to what extent, and in which role. Not knowing or, better from an anthropological perspective, not having sufficient information to trust one's assessment of the reliability and robustness of information (Corsín Jiménez 2011) introduced high levels of suspicion into a market that was characterized by knowability, the ability to add to the information readily available and identify its robustness at need.

Conservative norms and ethics – a recurring feature of ‘traditional’ mercantile groups visible in the Iranian bazaar as much as in a plethora of contexts across temporal, spatial, and cultural boundaries – nurtured by shared religious practice, shared social space and cultural practice, and strong commonalities in socio-economic organization rooted in class, community, and kinship structures created a sense of being able to know. The sense informed a sense of being able to trust, and the latter in turn facilitated recourse to collective action to punish transgressions once the loosely organized collective of merchants reached the conclusion that such a transgression had occurred.