Foreign banks and global finance in modern China: A conversation with Ghassan Moazzin

Ghassan Moazzin's Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is a scrupulously researched and riveting story about the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank (DAB), a German bank that was active in China between 1890 and World War I. The DAB rose to become the peer of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) and a major underwriter of Chinese Government debt. It also built a successful commercial business, financing international trade between China and the West. The book draws on intensive archival research from Germany, the United Kingdom, China, and Taiwan, leaning especially heavily on the rich collection of archives in the two European countries. It challenges the received notion of foreign banks in China as being mere expressions of foreign imperialism, highlighting instead Chinese agency and the interdependence between foreign bankers and their Chinese customers.