History of money: Difference between revisions
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==The emergence of money== |
==The emergence of money== |
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[[Image:Blombosbeads3.jpg|thumb|left|250px| Shells of the pea-sized snail Nassarius kraussianus. Blombos Cave, South Africa, 75,000 B.P. Wear marks indicate the shells were strung on a necklace.]] |
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The use of proto-money may date back to at least 75,000 [[Before_Present|B.P]]., when shell necklaces were made in Blombos Cave in South Africa. These necklaces would have provided the basic attributes needed of early money. In cultures where metal working was unknown, shell or ivory jewelry were the most divisible, easily storable and transportable, scarce, and hard to counterfeit objects that could be made. It is highly unlikely that there were formal markets in 75,000 [[Before_Present|B.P]] (any more than there are in recently observed hunter-gatherer cultures). Nevertheless, proto-money would have been useful in reducing the costs of less frequent transactions that were crucial to hunter-gatherer cultures, especially bride purchase, splitting property upon death, tribute, and intertribal trade in hunting ground rights (“starvation insurance”) and implements. In the absence of a medium of exchange, all of these transactions suffer from the basic problem of [[barter]] -- they require an improbable [[coincidence of wants]] or events. |
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In cultures of any era that lack money, [[barter]] and some system of in-kind "credit" or "gift exchange" would be the only ways to exchange goods. Bartering has several problems, most notably timing constraints. If you wish to trade fruit for wheat, you can only do this when the fruit and wheat are both available at the same time and place. That may be a very brief time, or it may be never. With an intermediate commodity (whether it be shells, rum, gold, etc.) you can sell your fruit when it is ripe and take the intermediate commodity. You can then use the intermediate commodity to buy wheat when the wheat harvest comes in. Thus the use of money makes all [[commodity|commodities]] become more [[liquidity|liquid]]. |
In cultures of any era that lack money, [[barter]] and some system of in-kind "credit" or "gift exchange" would be the only ways to exchange goods. Bartering has several problems, most notably timing constraints. If you wish to trade fruit for wheat, you can only do this when the fruit and wheat are both available at the same time and place. That may be a very brief time, or it may be never. With an intermediate commodity (whether it be shells, rum, gold, etc.) you can sell your fruit when it is ripe and take the intermediate commodity. You can then use the intermediate commodity to buy wheat when the wheat harvest comes in. Thus the use of money makes all [[commodity|commodities]] become more [[liquidity|liquid]]. |
Revision as of 05:53, 14 August 2006
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Numismatics the study of currency |
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The history of money is a story thousands of years old. Numismatics is the scientific study of money and its history in all its varied forms.
Money itself must be a scarce good. Many items have been used as money, from naturally scarce precious metals and conch shells through cigarettes to entirely artificial money such as banknotes. Modern money (and most ancient money too) is essentially a token -- an abstraction. Paper currency is perhaps the most common type of physical money today. However, goods such as gold or silver retain many of the essential properties of money.
The emergence of money
In cultures of any era that lack money, barter and some system of in-kind "credit" or "gift exchange" would be the only ways to exchange goods. Bartering has several problems, most notably timing constraints. If you wish to trade fruit for wheat, you can only do this when the fruit and wheat are both available at the same time and place. That may be a very brief time, or it may be never. With an intermediate commodity (whether it be shells, rum, gold, etc.) you can sell your fruit when it is ripe and take the intermediate commodity. You can then use the intermediate commodity to buy wheat when the wheat harvest comes in. Thus the use of money makes all commodities become more liquid.
Where trade is common, barter systems usually lead quite rapidly to the emergence of several key goods with monetary properties. In the early British colony of New South Wales in Australia, rum emerged quite soon after settlement as the most monetary of goods. When a nation is without a fiat currency system it is quite common for the fiat currency of a neighbouring nation to emerge as the dominant monetary good. In some prisons where conventional money is prohibited it is quite common for goods such as cigarettes to take on a monetary quality. Gold has emerged naturally from the world of barter again and again to take on a monetary function. It should be noted that the emergence of monetary goods is not dependent on central authority or government. It is a quite natural market phenomenon.
Commodity money
Many early instances of money were objects which were useful for their intrinsic value as well as their monetary properties. This has been called commodity money; historical examples include iron nails (in Scotland), pigs, rare seashells, whale's teeth, and (often) cattle. In medieval Iraq, bread was used as an early form of currency.
The use of shells or ivory was nearly universal before humans discovered how to work precious metals; in China, Africa, and many other areas, use of cowrie shells was common.
Salt and spices have been used as money. From 550 BC, accepting salt from a person was synonymous with drawing a salary, taking pay, or being in that person's service. Definite indications are available that both black and white pepper have been used as commodity money for hundreds of years before Christ, and also several centuries thereafter. Being a valuable commodity, pepper has naturally been used as payment. Alaric reportedly demanded 3,000 pounds in weight of pepper in 408 AD as part of a ransom for the city of Rome. In the Middle Ages, there was a French saying, 'As dear as pepper'. In England, rent could be paid in pounds of pepper, and so a symbolic minimal amount is known as a "peppercorn rent".
Even in the modern world, in the absence of other types of money, people have occasionally used commodities such as tobacco as money. This happened on a wide scale after World War II when cigarettes became used unofficially in Europe, in parallel with other currencies, for a short time. It also occurs in some remoter parts of countries such as Colombia and Bolivia, where cocaine, or its precursor, coca paste, is used as a commodity money.
Another example of "commodity money" is shell money in the Solomon Islands. Shells are painstakingly chipped into rough circles, filed down, and threaded onto large necklaces, which are then used during marriage proposals; for instance, a father may charge twenty shell money necklaces for his daughter's hand in marriage.
One interesting example of commodity money is the huge limestone coins from the Micronesian island of Yap, quarried at great peril from a source several hundred miles away. The value of the coin was determined by its size — the largest of which could range from nine to twelve feet in diameter and weigh several tons. Displaying a large coin, often outside one's home, was a considerable status symbol and source of prestige in that society. (Due to the great inconvenience, islanders would often trade only promises of ownership of an individual coin instead of actually moving it. In some cases, coins which had been lost at sea were still used for exchange in this way. These agreements could be thought of as a kind of representative money, described below.)
By 1400 BP in China, use of cowrie shells as money was common. In the centuries shortly after, Chinese produces metal imitations of cowrie shells and metal tools that may have been the precursors of coinage.
Once a commodity becomes used as money, it takes on a value that is often a bit different from what the commodity is intrinsically worth or useful for. Being able to use something as money in a society adds an extra use to it, and so adds value to it. This extra use is a convention of society, and how extensive the use of money is within the society will affect the value of the monetary commodity. So although commodity money is real, it should not be seen as having a fixed value in absolute terms. Its value is still socially determined to a large extent. A prime example is gold, which has been valued differently by many different societies, but perhaps none valued it more than those who used it as money. Fluctuations in the value of commodity money can be strongly influenced by supply and demand whether current or predicted (if a local gold mine is about to run out of ore, the relative market value of gold may go up in anticipation of a shortage).
Money can be anything that the parties agree is transferable value, but the usability of a particular sort of money varies widely. Desirable features of a good basis for money include being able to be stored for long periods of time, dense so it can be carried around easily, and difficult to find on its own so that it is actually worth something. Again, supply and demand play a key role in determining value.
Metals like gold and silver have been used as commodity money for thousands of years, being in the form of metal dust, nuggets, rings, bracelets and assorted pieces. Eventually the Lydians began coining gold and silver around 560 BC.
Gold and silver are both quite soft metals, and coins minted from the pure metals suffer from wear or deformation in daily use. Fortunately these metals are also easily alloyed with a less expensive metal, frequently copper, in order to improve the durability of the resulting coins. Typically alloys of coinage metals, such as sterling silver or 22 carat (92%) gold, are used to make coins more durable. These are alloys of 90% or more precious metal as alloys of less than 90% do not improve hardness or durability very much, and so are typically considered to be on the slippery slope into monetary debasement.
Standardized coinage
It was the discovery of the touchstone that paved the way for metal-based commodity money and coinage. Any soft metal can be tested for purity on a touchstone, allowing one to quickly calculate the total content of a particular metal in a lump. Gold is a soft metal, which is also hard to come by, dense, and storable. For these reasons gold as a money spread very quickly from Asia Minor where it first gained wide use, to the entire world.
Using such a system still required several steps and some math. The touchstone allowed you to estimate the amount of gold in an alloy, which was then multiplied by the weight to find the amount of gold alone in a lump.
To make this process easier, the concept of standard coinage was introduced. Coins were pre-weighed and pre-alloyed, so as long as you were aware of the origin of the coin, no use of the touchstone was required. Coins were typically minted by governments in a carefully protected process, and then stamped with an emblem that guaranteed the weight and value of the metal. It was however extremely common for governments to assert that the value of such money lay in its emblem and to subsequently debase the currency by lowering the content of valuable metal.
Although gold and silver were commonly used to mint coins, other metals could be used. Ancient Sparta minted coins from iron to discourage its citizens from engaging in foreign trade. In the early seventeenth century Sweden lacked more precious metal and so produced "plate money," which were large slabs of copper approximately 50cm or more in length and width, appropriately stamped with indications of their value.
Metal based coins had the advantage of carrying their value within the coins themselves — on the other hand they induced manipulations: the clipping of coins in the attempt to get and recycle the precious metal. A bigger problem was the simultaneous co-existence of gold, silver and copper coins in Europe. English and Spanish traders valued gold coins more than silver coins, as many of their neighbors did, with the effect that the English gold-based guinea coin began to rise against the English silver based crown in the 1670s and 1680s. Consequently, silver was ultimately pulled out of England for dubious amounts of gold coming into the country at a rate no other European nation would share. The effect was worsened with Asian traders not sharing the European appreciation of gold altogether — gold left Asia and silver left Europe in quantities European observers like Isaac Newton, Master of the Royal Mint observed with uneasiness.
Stability came into the system with national Banks guaranteeing to change money into gold at a promised rate, it did, however, not come easily. The Bank of England risked a national financial catastrophe in the 1730s when customers demanded their money to be changed into gold in a moment of crisis. Eventually London's merchants saved the bank and the nation with financial guarantees.
See also: Roman currency, coinage metal, for conversions of the European coins before the introduction of paper money: The Marteau Early 18th-Century Currency Converter.
Representative money
The system of commodity money in many instances evolved into a system of representative money. This occurred because banks would issue a paper receipt to their depositors, indicating that the receipt was redeemable for whatever precious goods were being stored (usually gold or silver money). It didn't take long before the receipts were traded as money, because everyone knew they were "as good as gold". Representative paper money made possible the practice of fractional reserve banking, where bankers would print receipts above and beyond the amount of acutal precious metal on deposit.
So in this system, paper currency and non-precious coinage had very little intrinsic value, but achieved significant market value by being backed by a promise to redeem it for a given weight of precious metal, such as silver. This is the origin of the term "British Pound" for instance; it was a unit of money backed by a Tower pound of sterling silver - hence the currency Pound Sterling. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many currencies were based on representative money through the use of the gold standard.
Fiat money
Fiat money refers to money that is not backed by reserves of another commodity. The money itself is given value by government fiat (Latin for "let it be done") or decree, enforcing legal tender laws, previously known as "forced tender", whereby debtors are legally relieved of the debt if they (offer to) pay it off in the government's money. By law the refusal of "legal tender" money in favor of some other form of payment is illegal, and has at times in history (Rome under Diocletian, and post-revolutionary France during the collapse of the assignats) invoked the death penalty.
Governments through history have often switched to forms of fiat money in times of need such as war, sometimes by suspending the service they provided of exchanging their money for gold, and other times by simply printing the money that they needed. When governments produce money more rapidly than economic growth, the money supply overtakes economic value. Therefore, the excess money eventually dilutes the market value of all money issued. This is called inflation. See open market operations.
In 1971 the US finally switched to fiat money indefinitely. At this point in time many of the economically developed countries' currencies were fixed to the US dollar (see Bretton Woods Conference), and so this single step meant that much of the western world's currencies became fiat money based.
Following the first Gulf War the president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, repealed the existing Iraqi fiat currency and replaced it with a new currency. Despite having no backing by a commodity and with no central authority mandating its use or defending its value the old currency continued to circulate within the politically isolated Kurdish regions of Iraq. It became known as the Swiss Dinar. This currency remained relatively strong and stable for over a decade. It was formally replaced following the second Gulf War.
Credit money
Credit money often exists in parallel with other money such as fiat money or commodity money, and from the user's point of view is indistinguishable from it. Most of the western world's money is credit money derived from national fiat money currencies.
Strictly speaking a debt is not money, primarily because debt can not act as a unit of account. All debts are denominated in units of something external to the debt. Hence credit money is not strictly money at all. However, credit money certainly acts as a money substitute when it comes to the other functions of money (medium of exchange and store of value). As such the existence of credit money may dampen demand for the real money and in so doing alter the dynamics of money's market value.
When paper money is merely an IOU for something such as gold, then the paper itself is not a unit of account but merely a convenient medium of exchange. Under a rigid gold-standard with convertibility, paper currency is merely a debt instrument. However, when paper money floats, its value is not defined by reference to an external unit of account. It is no longer a debt instrument but rather it becomes purely monetary and its value is a product of the dynamics of supply and demand. Typically a central bank forces supply and the private sector forces demand. See open market operations.
Credit money tends to arise as a byproduct of lending and borrowing money. The following example illustrates this.
Imagine you have deposited some gold coins in a bank vault. The bank might lend the coins to a second person based on a promise to pay equivalent coins back with a few extra at a time in the future. The second person can in the meantime use the coins normally as money. But you still own the coins, and you also could still use them - you could transfer their ownership to another person to pay for something you have bought by telling the bank to transfer them from your account to the other person's account. You might do this by writing a cheque. So in this simple example there are two people using the same coins as money at the same time. It's as if new money has been created by the act of lending. Taking it another step, if the second person spends the coins at a shop, and they end up being deposited back into the bank by the shopkeeper, the bank can lend them again. Now you and the shopkeeper can use the coins in the same way, by writing cheques or the equivalent in this example, and whoever borrows the coins a second time can use the coins directly as money. So there are three people with financial use of the coins. This can go on with many people ending up simultaneously using the same coins financially, but for each extra user there is a promise to pay equivalent coins back. These arrangements where many people use the same money simultaneously are in many respects the same as if there was extra money. The extra money that there appears to be is known as credit money. It is in regulating the amount of money a bank can lend that the controlling authority can set the money supply and change monetary policy. The credible promises to repay in a reasonable time give the extra money its value. It tends to exist in parallel with another form of money such as fiat money or commodity money, wherever banking-style loans are used, and occurs as a by-product of lending. It could occur without banks, but banks provide a degree of stability to the whole process by taking and evaluating the risk involved in each loan.
During the Crusades in Europe, precious goods would be entrusted to the Catholic Church's Knights Templar, who effectively created a system of modern credit accounts. Over time this system grew into the credit money that we know today, where banks create money by approving loans - although the risk and reserve policies of each national central bank sets a limit on this, requiring banks to keep reserves of fiat money to back their deposits. Sometimes, as in the U.S.A. during the Great Depression or the Savings and Loan crisis, trust in bank policies dropped and it was felt that government must intervene to keep the industry of credit at a desirable level. On the other hand, government policies (war debt, high tariffs, and gold hoarding in the case of the Depression, and government-subsidized risk in the case of the Savings and Loan crisis) heavily contributed to those problems in the first place.
Indo-European and Semitic etymology
The origin of the word "money" comes from the Latin word "moneta", which comes from the temple of Hera the Moneta where the Roman money came from, in the early days of Rome.
In Greek language, "Hera Mone tas" means the lonely Hera ("Mone tas" in Doric Greek, "Mone tes" in Ionic dialect). Zeus, once upon a time, punished Hera and tied her with a golden chain between earth and sky. Hera, because she was alone between sky and earth tied with gold, was called moneres or mone (μόνη) which means lonely, and this is where the word money comes from. Hera, with the help of Hephaestus, broke the golden chain and released herself. It is said that all gold found on earth (which forms approximately a single cube 20 m a side) originates from the fragments of this golden chain, which fall from the sky and became human's mone(y).
Maybe due to this fable, gold was used in ancient Greece only in temples, graves and jewels and there is not any ancient Greek golden coin, until the days around 390 BC, when the Greek king Philip II of Macedon minted golden coins. The first golden coins in history were coined by Lydian king Croesus, around 560 BC. The first Greek coins were made initially of copper, then of iron and this is because copper and iron were powerful materials used to make weapons. Pheidon king of Argos, around 700 BC, changed the coins from iron to a rather useless and ornamental metal, silver, and, according to Aristotle, dedicated some of the remaining iron coins (which were actually iron sticks) to the temple of Hera[1]. King Pheidon coined the silver coins at Aegina, at the temple of the goddess of wisdom and war Athena the Aphaia (the vanisher), and engraved the coins with a Chelone, which is to this day as a symbol of capitalism. Chelone coins[2] were the first medium of exchange that was not backed by a real value good. They were widely accepted and used as the international medium of exchange until the days of Peloponnesian War, when the Athenian Drachma replace them. According other fables, inventors of money were Demodike(or Hermodike) of Kyme (the wife of Midas), Lykos (son of Pandion II and ancestor of the Lycians) and Erichthonius, the Lydians or the Naxians.
The word money in Greek language is not μόνη (money), it is νόμισμα (nomisma or numisma) which derives from the word νομίζω (nomizo=putative,I think so,I suppose so) and from the word νόμος (nomos=law). So numisma gives the exact meaning and definition of mone(y). It is something we think it has value, or something that someone convinced us it has, but in reality it has not. Also, in case we are not convinced that mone(y) has value and we do not recognize the mone(y) maker authority, mone(y) is also something that we are enforced by law to use it as the unique medium of exchange in trades. In case an individual or a community refuses to accept mone(y) as the unique medium of exchange, then the powerful mone(y) maker authority, using violence and the taxes procedure, steals the real value goods (home,food,transport,energy) that the individual or the community owns. That is why many individuals or communities hide their goods from mone(y)-maker authorities. The crime of hiding goods from a mone(y)-maker authority is called tax evasion.
One of the words for money in the Hebrew language is mammon. Mammon does have more than one meaning depending on its linguistic and etymological contexts. The Hebrew and Christian Bible gives the word mammon a broader context in terms of its socioeconomic,cultural,and theological usages. Mammon, a word of Aramaic origin, means "riches", but has an unclear etymology; scholars have suggested connections with a word meaning "entrusted", or with the Hebrew word "matmon", meaning "treasure". It is also used in Hebrew as a word for "money" - ממון. The Greek word for "Mammon", mamonas, occurs in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew vi 24) and in the parable of the Unjust Steward (Luke xvi 9-13). The Authorised Version keeps the Syriac word. Wycliffe uses "richessis". Other scholars derive Mammon from Phoenician "mommon", benefit. An interesting notice is that if you consider the word mammon(as) (μαμωνTemplate:Polytonicς) as a Greek word and as a composite one (the majority of Greek words are composites), then the two parts "mam-mon(as)" could be explained (in Greek doric) as "lonely mother", which reminds Hera's myth mentioned above. Other explanations could be mamm(means "mother" or "food")-onas(means "a place where you can find mamm"), also mam(means "mother" or "food")-m(means "with")-on(means "being")-as(with Circumflex, means "owner or seller").
" He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the winner, I will give some of the hidden manna and I will also give him a white vote with a new name written on it which no one knows except the one who receives it."(Book of Revelation 2:17). According to the Book of Revelation, the mark of the beast seems to be a form of money. "And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding vote the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his(its) number is ΧΞς." (Book of Revelation 13:16-13:18). "And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the Wood of Life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with all saints. Amen." (Book of Revelation 22:19-22:21).
References
- Articles on where currency came from
- Shelling Out -- The Origins of Moneyby Nick Szabo
- United States Mint
- Royal Mint
- American Numismatic Association
- World Bank