Abstract
Silver was the dominant monetary standard for many centuries. It was supplanted by gold, in England in the early 18th century, in the United States in 1834, and in almost all of western Europe and in most of the British Empire in the 1870s and 1880s. With France no longer bimetallic, the exchange rate between gold-standard and silver-standard currencies fluctuated. The consequence was more countries leaving the silver standard for gold. By the First World War, China was the sole major country still on silver. US silver-purchase policy in the 1930s caused the virtual demonetization of silver worldwide.
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Officer, L.H. (2018). Silver Standard. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_1928
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_1928
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