Trust in Troubled Times is an important addition to the still relatively small body of literature on banking and finance in Republican China. In this careful and thoughtful study of the development of banking and paper money in Tianjin from late Qing to the eve of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Brett Sheehan analyses the rise of modern banks and the growth of social trust in such financial institutions, and examines their relations to the process of state-building. The work is solidly based on a wealth of primary sources including newspapers published in Tianjin, Beijing and Shanghai, archival materials in China, Taiwan and the United States, as well as interviews with individuals who had worked in Tianjin banks in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, one of the main contributions of this book is the tremendous amount of data amassed by the author that illuminates the complexity of the problems associated with banking and finance in the pre-1949 period.

Drawing on Western theories on banking and social trust, Sheehan begins his study with a discussion of a theoretical framework which provides not only a foundation for the analysis of developments in Tianjin, but also the basis for comparative studies of institution and state-building in different political, social and economic milieus. He then examines a series of financial crises, from the moratorium on exchange in 1916, the bank runs under the warlord governments, the financial instability created by the Japanese attack on Shanghai in 1932, and the monetary reforms of the Nationalist government in 1935. The responses of government officials, bankers and the local elites to the crises, the strategies they used to establish and promote impersonal trust in Tianjin banks, and the impact of these crises on the elites, the banking profession and state-society relations constitute the main body of the study. The story is both encouraging and disheartening: encouraging because by 1937, trust in Chinese-owned and operated banks was indeed established; disheartening because the banks failed to gain the autonomy that could have shielded them from the abuses of the government.