The archive.

A tael is a weight, not a coin: for Hermann Schwarzwald, misunderstanding this distinction leads European observers to misread Chinese money and prescribe unsuitable reforms. His 1914 article examines payments in silver whose value depends on local weight standards and metallic fineness, turning apparent monetary disorder into a challenge to theories that ground money in state authority. Drawing explicitly on Eugen Dühring, Schwarzwald argues that reform should make commercial practice more reliable rather than replace it by decree. His proposal for freely minted, full-weight silver coins gives that position concrete form. The tension is practical as well as theoretical: how can China simplify domestic payments while meeting foreign debts fixed in gold? Readers encounter both the mechanics of silver settlement and a sharply partisan account of the boundary between monetary certification and fiscal exploitation.

To pry loose the American loans the Central Powers desperately needed, Schwarzwald proposes an unlikely lever: silver. His confidential memorandum, printed in Vienna two months into the war, tells the statesmen of Berlin and Vienna that Britain's command of the sea lanes and of finance gives the Entente a durable edge, and that only organized interest, not appeals to neutrality, will move the United States. A permanent pledge of free silver coinage would enrich American mining and banking groups while loosening London's grip. The coins, marked by metric weight, would circulate beside the untouched gold mark and crown at market value, a parallel currency he sharply severs from the discredited fixed ratios of bimetallism and defends, with precedents from Hamburg to China, as older and more honest money.

Das Mittel dazu ist die dauernde Freigabe unbeschränkten monetären Gebrauchs des Silbers.

English translation: “The means to that end is the permanent authorization of the unrestricted monetary use of silver.”

A stable exchange rate can conceal a struggle over who controls monetary wealth. In this 1914 review of Keynes’s Indian Currency and Finance, Hermann Schwarzwald asks whose interests are served when Indian reserves finance the London money market while Indians face higher borrowing costs. He acknowledges Keynes’s account of monetary administration but disputes the security and legitimacy of a currency dependent on British officials’ willingness to redeem it. His distinctive counterargument joins criticism of colonial financial power to a strict metallism: precious metals constitute independently valuable property, whereas credit should rest on consent. His defense of Indian gold saving makes that connection especially concrete. The review offers a pointed encounter between administrative efficiency and monetary independence, while exposing the assumptions about property that underpin Schwarzwald’s challenge to Keynes.

What might China lose by acquiring a supposedly modern currency? In this 1914 article, Hermann Schwarzwald argues that silver valued by weight and fineness offers protections that a national coinage and central issuing bank could undermine. His defence of metallic money, informed by Eugen Dühring, turns apparent monetary disorder into a question of who controls value: those who weigh and verify silver, or governments and banks that enforce nominal denominations. British India supplies his warning about exchange stability purchased at the cost of financial dependence. Yet he advocates standardization, not the preservation of every local custom. The article exposes the political choices within technical proposals for currency reform, while making clear how Schwarzwald’s opposition to foreign financial control rests on his distrust of credit-based money.

When monetary expansion is called economic progress, who actually gains? In this 1915 review of Ernst Wagemann’s study of Chile, Hermann Schwarzwald insists on identifying the beneficiaries before accepting the claim. He credits Wagemann’s use of sources but attacks explanations that turn private advantage into public benefit. His concrete examples give the dispute its edge: state notes used to purchase mortgage bonds while wages lost purchasing power, and nitrate workers paid in company tokens. The latter, he argues, amount to interest-free loans extracted from workers, not a saving for society. This compact, polemical review offers a pointed encounter with Schwarzwald’s distributive approach to monetary history—and with his suspicion of theories that obscure transfers of wealth behind the language of national prosperity.