Yellow money: China, the silver question, and the rise of the American West

Includes bibliographical references (pages 77-98)This thesis addresses an unexplored area in U.S.-China relations to explain the United States??? implementation of the gold standard during the nineteenth century. Existing scholarship indicates that the celebrated international Gold Standard Era (1870-1914) resulted from national government policy shifts during the 1870s that preferred a common monetary metal for trade purposes. In consequence, gold and bimetallic nations, including the United States, abandoned silver due to a belief that gold possessed superior properties as a store of value. However, I find that both economists and economic historians have failed to consider China???s prominence within the world economy as a dominant silver consumer and how this dynamic affected silver???s decline as a global monetary metal. By the 1860s, when the U.S. acquired its own silver supplies in the American West, bankers and government officials preferred to send silver dollars abroad to China and not for domestic circulation. This practice formed the structural conditions that engendered the U.S. political silver crisis and subsequent Populist movement during the 1880s and 1890s. Furthermore, the efforts of William Chapman Ralston, a prominent California banker, to corner the Pacific silver market, solidified the United States transition from a de facto to a de jure gold standard in Coinage Act of 1873. Ralston deserves credit for the notorious ???Crime of ???73,??? when the U.S. silver dollar was demonetized. Ralston???s connections to prominent U.S. Senators and mint officials enabled him to substitute the 420 grain Trade Dollar, a silver coin designed for export to China, in place of the traditional 412 grain U.S. silver dollar. Ralston???s efforts to coin silver for China disclosed how U.S. perceptions about silver and the silver dollar???s purpose within the U.S. economy was shaped by the United States??? economic relationship with the Asian nation