This panel examines how copper currency shaped the economies and societies of empires across Asia between 1600 and 1860. Following Columbus's voyages to the New World and the rise of the Spanish Empire, vast quantities of Latin American silver flowed into Asia from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, profoundly transforming Asian economies and everyday life.

Therefore, scholarship on early modern and nineteenth-century Asian monetary systems has tended to foreground silver. Yet silver alone cannot explain how exchange actually worked on the ground. Across major Asian economies—including China, Japan, Korea, India, and much of Southeast Asia—copper cash coins anchored routine market activity precisely because silver’s purchasing power was too high for most quotidian exchanges. Wages and small payments depended on low-denomination copper currency, making monetary life fundamentally bimetallic in practice.

Re-centering copper also reshapes familiar narratives of the free fall of China economy in the mid-nineteenth century, which often emphasized silver outflows associated with British opium trade. This panel adds a complementary perspective: disruptions in the supply, valuation, and circulation of copper coin precipitated the monetary dislocations that contributed to Daoguang Depression (1820–1850) and the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864), the deadliest civil war in imperial Chinese history.

This panel also highlights copper currency’s role as an international medium of exchange. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the circulation of copper coinage linked intra-Asian markets. Chinese official copper coins were widely accepted across maritime East and Southeast Asia, and merchants and colonial authorities in Batavia imitated Chinese official copper coins to issue their own local petty currencies, sometimes minting them from tin and lead. By tracing these movements, imitations, and substitutions, the panel reconstructs copper currency as an international monetary technology that connected the Qing and Dutch Empires.

The four papers proceed chronologically to build a cohesive narrative. Freek Loves examines the persistence of small-denomination lead coins known as pitjes in seventeenth-century Batavia. He challenges the view that Dutch colonial authorities successfully replaced pitjes with an imposed copper coinage, showing instead the resilience of pitjes within the city’s commercial ecology. Xiaoyu Gao then follows the early nineteenth-century reconfiguration of Asian trade after the collapse of Spanish Empire, arguing that British and American merchants constructed new circuits by illicitly exporting Qing standard copper coins—highly demanded in Southeast Asia—in exchange for Southeast Asian rice demanded by South China’s growing population. This rice-for-copper trade, Gao suggests, drained South China of good copper coins and destabilized local monetary conditions. Meiqi Ding shifts from circulation to accounting practices by analyzing hundreds of account books and commercial contracts to recover an imaginary copper money system in which units of account diverged from physical coin counts, integrating heterogeneous coinages and underwriting everyday credit relations. Finally, Tai-kuang Ho revisits the Xianfeng era (1851–1862) token-coin experiment and its collapse, placing Qing overvalued copper issues in comparative perspective with European debasement. Using fiscal and monetary evidence, he models the social and economic dynamics of overvaluation and explains why this debasement technology proved self-defeating.