Niv Horesh

Niv Horesh is Associate Professor in Chinese Studies at the School of Humanities and Languages, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, Australia.

His first book, Shanghai's Bund and Beyond, is the first comparative study of foreign banking in prewar China. The book surveys the impact of British overseas bank notes on China's economy before the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Focusing on the two leading British banks in the region (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China), it assesses the favourable and unfavourable effects of the British presence in China, with particular emphasis on Shanghai, and traces instructive links between the changing political climate and banknote circulation volumes. Drawing on recently declassified archival materials, Niv Horesh revises previous assumptions about China's prewar economy, including the extent of foreign banknote circulation and the economic significance of the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925.

Horesh's second book Chinese Money in Global Contex (Stanford UP 2013, Economics and Finance Series) makes for a China-centered examination of the evolution of money and finance around the word since the birth of coinage in Lydia and up to the present.

His third book is Shanghai, Past and Present. It is an introduction to the warp and weft of the city's history written with non-specialists in mind.