Kuroda’s studies cover comparative studies of monetary history on East Asia, India, Africa, and Europe, as well as specific studies of China’s monetary history.
The key notion in current study of his is the complementarity among monies. The historical evidence of coexisting monies suggests that a currency or a denomination of a certain origin and description is not necessarily a substitute for another, and that the acceptance of money is neither exclusively dependent on its intrinsic value nor on the formal backing of an issuing authority. Uncertain and unstable conditions for the conversion between various kinds of money indicate that the existence of multiple monies has significance greater than that embodied by the notion of currency substitution.
Along the line mentioned above he organised the session ‘Revisiting Money as a Unified Unit of Account from a Complementary Viewpoint’ in15th World Economic History Congress on 4th August, 2009, University of Utrecht and the session ‘Complementary Relationship among Monies in History’ in 14thInternational Economic History Congress on 24th August 2006, University of Helsinki.
He is now leading a project whose title is ‘International cooperative research on the complementarity among monies caused by temporality, seasonality, and locality in making transactions’ with a research fund by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
The Memoirs of Institute of Oriental Culture
and The Monograph Series of the Institute of Oriental Culture
are abbreviated in this section as MIOC and MSIOC.