Chapter 1. Where can we look for better money: to the market or to the state? It is a myth that better money has always, and can only, come from government or other collective action. Theory and historical evidence indicate that the “state theory of money” is false: Private initiative gave rise to the earliest commodity monies to serve the needs of commerce. Although sovereign states commandeered the coinage in antiquity, not to improve it but to extract revenue, we provide the evidence that private mints worked well when and where they were allowed. Silver and gold coins were valued by weight, not by which ruler’s face was stamped upon them. Private currencies in the form of redeemable banknotes were the most popular form of payment in the nineteenth century, and their introduction preceded government paper currencies. Central banks in monopolizing the issue of currency and obstructing international specie flows did not improve the monetary system but the contrary. While contemporary [italic]fiat[/italic] money (non-commodity money issued by government) rests on the power of the state, gold and Bitcoin do not require the imprimatur of the sovereign to serve as good money.

Chapter 3 shows how stewards of the princes of Orange-Nassau employed a specific money of account, the Artois pound, to manage land, livestock, and corvée labour across the family’s fifty domains, one of which was the lordship of Bredevoort. The Artois pound was not minted as coins, and nobody in Bredevoort used it to make or receive payments. As an accounting convention, it only existed as ink on slips of paper and in bound volumes and thus required constant scribal labour to be valuable. The stewards’ trained eyes and hands parsed the multiplicity of Bredevoort’s coins, animals, grains, and labour into homogeneous money objects that had currency across the entire accounting system, but not beyond. As the chapter shows, such a system using homogeneous money was also imagined by the mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin, and while he failed to install double-entry bookkeeping in the domains of the Orange-Nassau family, the stewards shared his ideals of surveillance and profit. A series of instructions provided the script for the audit rituals that were performed year after year and that left their traces on the pages of the accounts.

Farmers and other rural folk are often pictured as distant from financial centres and invoked as the last groups to monetise their transactions during a long process of modernisation. By treating grain as money and by comparing barns to banks, Chapter 2 raises important questions about this accepted picture and about the boundaries of financial history as a discipline. This chapter explores how a community in the east of the Dutch Republic sowed, tended to, harvested, stored, and kept track of grain. People sustained the material integrity of grain, but more importantly, they also sustained grain’s ability to act as currency in social interaction. Volume measures, owned privately but calibrated by local authorities, were key for the monetisation of grain. Furthermore, the chapter introduces the notion of ink money, normally associated with urban merchants and bankers who made and unmade money by formal accounting, in order to make sense of farmers’ finance in the Dutch countryside. Unlike trade among merchants, where both parties could produce ledgers when challenged, farmers keeping accounts often dealt with illiterate people. These account books provide indirect evidence that day-labourers and smallholders could record and transact monetary value by way of mental accounting. This money was more precarious than its written counterparts, but could be validated by oral testimonial in local courts.

This chapter examines the evolution of monetary standards in Korea, through which commodity money is replaced by paper money, and then paper money by electronic and digital payment instruments.

This introduction explores a range of theoretical approaches to reading the relationship between literature and credit. It suggests an alternative to the postmodern reading of the ending of the gold standard. It offers a new reading of E. L. Doctorow’s classic postmodern novel Ragtime, one that depends upon neither pastiche nor parody but a return to the varied times of the credit economy.

The peasant economy depended on some purchases of essentials like querns and whetstones yet the numismatic record does not support the idea of a widely available currency of a low denomination low enough to have been used in every transaction. Cash circulated through waged work and small-scale marketing but Anglo-Saxon coins were of too high a denomination to have been used for petty sales and purchases. Thinking only in terms of an officially sanctioned currency may be a barrier to understanding early medieval attitudes to money. Real life practice may have been more flexible. All that trading partners need is a trusted medium of exchange and in the countryside marketing may have been much less regulated than the laws prescribe. Other units of value, reckoned in monetary terms, could do the work that coinage did.