The round table is the kick-off meeting of the ANR (Agence nationale de la recherche) program DAMIN (La Dépréciation de l’Argent Monétaire et les Relations Internationales - Silver monetary depreciation and international relations).

The aim of the program is to analyze the question of the rise and fall of the bimetallism and the question of the depreciation of silver in the nineteenth century. This analyze includes the important question of the role of Asia and especially of Japan in the silver question. A large place is given to the questions of coin production, monetary unifications with the emergence of common currencies (cf. Latin Union in Europe, Dollar and Mexican Dollar, Yen, etc.) in a process of globalization of the monetary market, including the question of the shift to the gold standard. The period concerned is mainly the XIXth century, in a large acceptance.

The DAMIN program (2012-2015), will support and encourage several actions such as publication, republication of the main basic documentation such as International Monetary Conferences, Reports of silver committees, etc., some of them already published in the Moneta collection, especially in the series Documents and Studies on 19th c. Monetary History, www.moneta.be. Translations of documents from non-European languages are also parts of the program. Of course, analyses and elaborations of new interpretation are the final goal of the program ; comparative studies with other periods of monetary globalization are welcome, especially with the present situation of euro.

Aside the production of books, the DAMIN program will encourage, web publications, and will encourage video recorded conference to disseminate as much as possible the actions. The ANR DAMIN program is also one of the program of the laboratory Archéologie d’Orient et d’Occident et Textes Anciens www.archeo.ens.fr/ loin institution of the CNRS www.cnrs.fr and the École Normale Supérieure www.ens.fr. The DAMIN program is part of the wide LabEx program TransferS www.transfers.ens.fr itself part of the IdEx program PLS* www.parissciencesetlettres.org.

Participants and persons interested in the DAMIN program will meet to present, analyze the works in progress. The first meeting will take place at Paris (January 13-14).