The “Color” of Money: The Ruble, Competing Currencies, and Conceptions of Citizenship in Manchuria and the Russian Far East, 1890s–1920s

Abstract

Transformed by Russian colonial expansion in the late 1890s, the Chinese territory of Manchuria turned from a remote frontier into a locus of global metropolises in the making, where a complex money economy comprising of multiple currencies took root. Mirroring localized contestations and global rivalries, Russian proposals first advocated supporting a Chinese currency to “squeeze out” Mexican and “English” dollars, but settled on creating a ruble for Manchuria, to inscribe Manchuria as Russian. As depicted by Georg Simmel contemplating the European metropolis in the 1900s, money was “colorless,” an instrument of equivalence without intrinsic quality, or “color,” that homogenized qualitative differences. In the colonial and multiethnic setting of Manchuria, however, money took the form of competing currencies that by the 1920s included various Russian rubles, the Soviet chervonets, a Japanese yen, and a variety of Chinese dollars. In this form, money in Manchuria was “colored”–by the qualitative differences associated with supposed national character and perceptions of strengths and weaknesses that found expression in the way currency exchange rate became an everyday concern for the local urban population. This paper traces Russian and Chinese efforts to render their currencies “colorless” in the sense understood by Simmel, with colorlessness meaning uniformity and absence of qualities that would hinder the currencies' ideal function. The paper explores how these efforts–such as Soviet currency “unification” policies in the Russian Far East after 1922–worked to erase the diversity of the region with respect to monetary practices. Reading these efforts at achieving uniformity and eliminating “color” in another light, my paper suggests that the experience of living with competing currencies in the Manchurian urban environment also had a socializing effect that worked toward acceptance of difference and diversity, reflected in the emphasis on a currency's convertibility to another, rather than on any one currency's unique presence. This paper thus also investigates the ways competing currencies in Manchuria might have shaped Russian and Chinese conceptions of citizenship in the direction of disregarding the “color”–the supposed intrinsic qualities marking their differences–of the diverse ethnicities of the region's population, in favor of a vision of functional equivalence, equality, and equal participation indicated by the principle of currency circulation.