The introduction describes the aims and approach taken in this book. This is a study of money as social technology in the early modern world, written from the vantage point of the Dutch Republic. It aims to view early modern money 'from the inside' by studying everyday practices of makers and users of money, especially in a rural society in the east of the Dutch Republic. It analyses how public institutions (through minters, assayers, and government officials) and private individuals (farmers, merchants, and accountants) interacted in the creation and maintenance of Europe’s system of currencies. The specific focus of this book is on accounting practices and practices of material scrutiny because they offer a key to understanding the internal logic of early modern money.

Chapter 1 develops the notion of money as social technology which carries the analysis throughout the subsequent, more narrative chapters. The vivid case of a clandestine Catholic congregation in the east of the Netherlands, which used money to restore its social and material fabric, is placed alongside insights drawn from scholarship about Chinese, African, and Pacific history. The core idea is that technology is a relationship between people, objects, and meaning. Technology refers to a technique exercised within a social context which gives meaning to both the maker and the made object. In the present case this means that an object is turned into money when makers and users make it fungible, that is, when they imbue it with qualities that allow it to be reliably exchanged for something else. This technological approach brings into focus how money objects bring forth and change social structure; and, conversely, where social structures are techniques that create and transform money objects.

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.

Chapter 5 examines taxonomic practices of merchants and other users of money to better understand how early modern coins worked in circulation. After-death inventories offer insights into people’s domestic taxonomies, that is, into practices of classifying, labelling, and compartmentalising the money that people encountered as they went about their lives. Mercantile and institutional account books show how people linked different currencies. Assayers’ conclusions, derived from testing tiny specks of matter, were disseminated widely in broadsheets, coin tariffs, and conversion tables, but also in privately collated notes and letters. This information allowed early modern people to relate coins to one another and to convert them into monies of account which were much more homogeneous. This work was more than merely coping with chaos. People’s ability to match coins with transaction types and geography marked out circuits for specific currencies. The spaces in which currencies like the Dutch guilder could circulate freely thus emerged from the ground up. Users’ taxonomic practices were just as crucial for upholding monetary order as the knowledge work performed by assayers, minters, and government officials.