In the currency culture of human history, there are two wonderful works that are immortal. One is that of China, an ancient Oriental civilization, which has influenced the currency culture of many Asian countries for more than a thousand years. The other is the monetary culture of ancient Greece, the birthplace of western monetary culture, which later gave rise to the Arab and Indian coin systems. This book presents survey on Chinese ancient currency of all ages, before moving on to elaborate upon the history of currency culture exchange between China and other countries, such as ancient Greece and Rome, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Southern Asia, Western and central Asia. It considers the influence of Chinese currency on the currency development of the neighboring Asian regions and countries, as well as the interaction between ancient Chinese coins and European and American coins in different periods.

This book documents the relationship and wisdom of Asian cartographers in the Islamic and Chinese worlds before the Europeans arrived.

Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity offers an integrated picture of Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppes during a formative period of world history. In the half millennium between 250 and 750 CE, settled empires underwent deep structural changes, while various nomadic peoples of the steppes (Huns, Avars, Turks, and others) experienced significant interactions and movements that changed their societies, cultures, and economies. This was a transformational era, a time when Roman, Persian, and Chinese monarchs were mutually aware of court practices, and when Christians and Buddhists criss-crossed the Eurasian lands together with merchants and armies. It was a time of greater circulation of ideas as well as material goods. This volume provides a conceptual frame for locating these developments in the same space and time. Without arguing for uniformity, it illuminates the interconnections and networks that tied countless local cultural expressions to far-reaching inter-regional ones.

The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction is a new look at an ancient subject: the silk road that linked China, India, Persia and the Mediterranean across the expanses of Central Asia. James A. Millward highlights unusual but important biological, technological and cultural exchanges over the silk roads that stimulated development across Eurasia and underpin civilization in our modern, globalized world.

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research in the field of monetary and financial history. The authors comprise different generations of leading scholars from universities worldwide. Thanks to its unrivaled breadth both in time (from antiquity to the present) and geographical coverage (from Europe to the Americas and Asia), the volume is set to become a key reference for historians, economists, and social scientists with an interest in the subject. The handbook reflects the existing variety of scholarly approaches in the field, from theoretically driven macroeconomic history to the political economy of monetary institutions and the historical evolution of monetary policies. Its thematic sections cover a wide range of topics, including the historical origins of money; money, coinage, and the state; trade, money markets, and international currencies; money and metals; monetary experiments; Asian monetary systems; exchange rate regimes; monetary integration; central banking and monetary policy; and aggregate price shocks.

Introduces a crucial period of world history when the vast exchange network of the Silk Roads connected most of Eurasia.

Applies the 'life history' of objects approach to China's prehistoric, early dynastic and more recent material culture.