开埠初期上海的国际贸易与汇兑

The international Trade and Foreign Exchange in Shanghai: the Early Period of Treaty Port

整个18世纪的中英贸易中,中国始终处于出超地位。起初,英国除了运送白银以外,别无弥补贸易差额的手段。国际贸易所形成的货币在埠际间的流通量年均约数亿两白银,如此庞大的货币量,在埠际运来运去,要消耗大量的人力、物力和财力。从经济学观点看来,为了节约社会劳动的不必要耗费,以汇票代替运现越来越成为现实的需要。上海开埠初期的十几年间,国际贸易结算方式历史地从现银结算向汇兑结算转变,这种转变并非一蹴而就,其中洋行在汇兑交易中暂时处于操控地位。

Foreign Exchange and Trade are very closely associated with each other, and the imbalance of trade is the prima- ry reason of the appearance of foreign exchange. In the Sino - British trade during the whole 18^th Century, China was always at the position of surplus. In the beginning, Britain didn＇t have any measures to make up the trade deficit other than carrying silver. The quantity of money circulated around trade ports, which formed by international trade, was hundred millions taels of silver per year approximately. It is clearly that to carry such gigantic quantity of money among trade ports, great personal, material and financial resources would be expanded. From the point of view of economics, for saving the unnecessary expanding of social labor, the need of the bill of exchange in place of carrying cash was growing up to be realistic. In ten and more years of the early period that Shanghai opened to be a treaty port, the accounting manner of international trade was changed historically from the silver cash settlement to the exchange settlement. This change, however, was not accomplished in an action. Temporarily, the controller and operator of foreign exchange was the Foreign Firm.