This chapter discusses categories of precious metal assets (bullion, trade coins, and local coins) and their roles within eighteenth-century Amsterdam. Bullion was valued for its fine content, but failed to meet the modern definition of a “safe asset,” because its use as a means of payment was limited by the need for assay. Popular varieties of high-denomination trade coins, on the other hand, did function more as safe assets because they circulated freely, often cross-border, at premia above the value of their advertised fine content. The Bank’s archives show that these trade coins were seen as safe enough to value by “tale,” that is, by enumeration. Trade coins were the major form of collateral held at the Bank. However, the Bank also occasionally dealt in low-denomination local coins. Local coins were rarely employed in international trade but were commonly used within the domestic economy of the Dutch Republic and nearby areas. The chapter explains that players in the Amsterdam market, the Bank included, always viewed these categories of precious metal as distinct types of assets.

This chapter considers English writing about market values from the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries – taking as its termini the dissolution of the monasteries, which began in 1536, and the trade depression of the early 1620s. The chapter portrays some of the give and take between proto-literary and proto-economic writing in this period by focusing on the emergent concept of productivity. It begins by outlining the changing material and ideological conditions that prompted writerly attention to money and trade from merchants, statesmen, and imaginative writers. It shows how apparently limited topics of monetary debate in the period – debasement, usury, and the export of bullion – were amplified into far-reaching critiques of value by imaginative writers. And it shows how these value critiques tended in turn to support an emergent arena of autonomous value in what we might recognize as literary production.

Darius I overcame rebellions and seized the throne of Babylon, but cuneiform scholarship continued and developed; religious practices did not change, nor did the great buildings on the citadel. The zodiac scheme came into use. The Achaemenid king took Babylonian royal titles and promoted the worship of Marduk for local purposes. Xerxes broke the continuity. Following an uprising, a purge led to the ending of many archives. The province of Babylon was divided in two. Subsequent Achaemenid kings continued to treat Babylon with reverence. Alexander the Great defeated Darius III, entered Babylon, retained the Persian satrap, and moved treasure from Susa and Ecbatana to Babylon. He was recognized as a god. Lack of sons at his premature death precipitated a civil war from which Alexander’s commander Seleucus emerged to take the throne jointly with his son Antiochus. The derelict ziggurat was demolished, but temples and rituals, chronicles and astronomical diaries, continued as before. Aramaic was widely used, and fewer texts were inscribed in cuneiform. Interest in the fall of Assyria and of the Babylonian empire is apparent in Greek literature. Famous scholars include Berossus and named astronomers. Parthians invaded and eventually ended the dynasty.

In Memorandum on the Debts of State (1715) Montesquieu explains how to curb France’s debt crisis stemming principally from Louis XIV’s war-mongering. Rather than recommending declaration of bankruptcy, he proposes a gradual reduction of the debt by means of a partial repudiation. The greater the proportion of an individual’s overall wealth invested in the crown’s debt, the less the reduction would be, since such individuals would have fewer other investments. Montesquieu was confident his debt reduction plan would succeed and predicted the king would be able to reduce taxes. In his Considerations on the Wealth of Spain (1727–1728) he explains that the main reason for the collapse of Spain as a powerhouse in modern Europe was that the Spanish became the victims of inflation. The more bullion brought to Spain’s shores, the less valuable it became since more and more specie chased roughly the same amount of goods.

Gresham’s law is much more than the idea that ‘bad money drives out good’ always and everywhere. Instead, historians should use Gresham’s law as a complex and interconnected set of conditions and premises involving ‘external’ elements (legal tender laws, differing coinage standards, transaction costs etc.) and an ‘internal’ sensitivity among (some!) coin-users to the precious metal content of coins.The ‘external’ conditions of Gresham’s law seem to have been inconsistently present at best. Legal coin values and precious metal values were more or less redundant during first century and a half of the Principate. A growing dissonance between legal value and metal value, however, emerged by the late second century AD, putting pressure on coin-users’ monetary habits. The actions of Roman authorities encouraged any metallist-minded coin-users to avoid the now relative high costs of monetary exchange at legal values and instead adopt special-purpose uses for money. The counterfactual logic of Gresham’s law, therefore, offers historians both improved understanding of Roman coin-users’ thinking as well as broader insights into the workings of the Roman monetary economy.