Conférence donnée par Akinobu Kuroda lors de la table ronde "Small change: bronze/copper coins from Antiquity to 19th c.", organisée dans le cadre de l'ANR DAMIN (La Dépréciation de l'Argent Monétaire et les relations Internationales) en partenariat avec le labex TransferS.
After the end of the Bronze Age and before the period of casting cannon, the largest demand for copper in East Asia had come from minting copper coins, otherwise for moulding Buddhist statues. Meanwhile, it was difficult for private entrepreneurs to make profits through mining copper, since its developing cost was quite large. Thus, supply of copper had almost exclusively depended on official mining. Since 8th century, unofficial casting copper coin had been prohibited by death penalty. However, the huge cost of mining, casting and distribution caused the dynasties to fail to keep its sufficient supply, except for three half-centuries (around BC2nd, AD11th and 18th) through two millenniums. Accordingly, Chinese business had often suffered from the shortage of currency. Unearth of unidentified hoards had been a way of ‘new’ supply since its early stage. The majority of copper coins in current was actually made illegally and supplied privately. Under such conditions local agreements assorting various coinages were locally made. The consistency through two millenniums and the unicity across empire of official copper coins could have been sustained only in tandem with the locality by various private measures.
Voir aussi
|
Cursus :
Les recherches de Akinobu Kuroda portent sur les études comparatives de l'histoire monétaire en Asie, Inde, Afrique et Europe. Il travaille spécifiquement sur l'histoire monétaire de la Chine. Dans ce cadre il dirige le projet "International cooperative research on the complementarity among monies caused by temporality, seasonality, and locality in making transactions". Il est docteur en économie de l'Université de Kyoto depuis 1995.
Cliquer ICI pour fermerDernière mise à jour : 10/07/2017