Yves right here. I belief you’ll get pleasure from Michael Hudson’s ahead to a brand new translation of a exceptional previous guide, Heinrich Schurtz’s Origins of Cash. You possibly can obtain each Hudson’s textual content and Schurtz’s guide free of charge right here. Hudson’s intro under makes clear that this 1897 guide mirrored anthropological work on the usage of cash in historic societies and was early to “unlearn” all of the hoary modern-intuition-friendly notions about how the usage of cash began. I have to confess I didn’t know that Schurtz was additionally the daddy of the idea of inside versus outdoors cash.
By Michael Hudson, a analysis professor of Economics at College of Missouri, Kansas Metropolis, and a analysis affiliate on the Levy Economics Institute of Bard Faculty. His newest guide is The Future of Civilization
The late 19th century noticed economists (primarily German and Austrian) create a mythology of cash’s origins that’s nonetheless being repeated in in the present day’s textbooks. Cash is alleged to have originated as simply one other commodity being bartered, with metallic most well-liked on account of being non-perishable (and therefore amenable to being saved), supposedly standardized (regardless of fraud if not minted in temples), and even considered simply divisible, as if silver might have been used for small market exchanges, which was unrealistic given the tough character of historic scales for weights of some grams.[1]
This mythology doesn’t acknowledge authorities as having performed any function as a financial innovator, sponsor or regulator, or as giving cash its worth by accepting it as a car to pay taxes, purchase public providers or make non secular contributions. Additionally downplayed is cash’s perform as a typical of worth for denominating and paying money owed.[2] Though there is no such thing as a empirical proof for the commodity-barter origin fable, it has survived on purely hypothetical grounds due to its political bias that serves the anti-socialist Austrian faculty and subsequent “free market” creditor pursuits opposing authorities cash creation.
Schurtz’s Remedy of Cash as A part of the Total Social System
As a founding father of financial anthropology, Heinrich Schurtz approached the origins of cash as being rather more complicated than the “financial” view that it emerged merely on account of households going to {the marketplace} to barter. Surveying a variety of indigenous ethnological communities, his 1897 Origins of Cash described their commerce and cash within the context of the institutional system inside which members sought standing and wealth.
Schurtz described this institutional system as forming the context for trade and commerce, and for financial programs that concerned a wide selection of social capabilities and dimensions, which in the present day’s “financial” theorizing excludes as “externalities,” that’s, exterior to its analytic scope. Inserting cash within the context of the group’s total system of social group, Schurtz warned that anybody who detaches “sociological and financial issues from the muse on which they grew … of their native soil … solely carries away part of the entire organism and fails to know the very important forces which have created and sustained it” (p. 117).
indigenous communities sufficiently remoted to have preserved presumably archaic traditions, Schurtz seen commerce with outsiders as main wealth to take an more and more financial kind that eroded social stability, even with out considering monetary wealth within the type of creditor claims for fee, tax obligationsand land hire. Setting “apart the distinction between commodities and actual property, which isn’t thought-about right here” (p. 124), Schurtz deemed the linkage between cash, debt and land tenure to lie past the world on which he centered, nor did he point out contributions to group feasts (which Bernard Laum would counsel because the germ from which Greek obols and drachmas could have developed).[3]
Schurtz’s Non-Monetary and Non-Fiscal Idea of Cash
At subject was how a cash financial system differs from barter. Was indigenous trade and wealth pre-monetary, an archaic seed that led to cash’s extra “totally fledged varieties” (p. 5)? The seed to which Schurtz referred concerned the trade of commodities on a comparatively small scale, largely for jewellery and different objects of non-public adornment, decorations and trophies within the type of shells and gem stones that gave their wearers or house owners standing.
These had been the paradigmatic types of indigenous wealth, particularly international unique merchandise or objects with an extended and prestigious historical past. Thorstein Veblen would name the possession and show of such objects conspicuous consumption in his 1899 Idea of the Leisure Class. They’d an trade worth, as they do in the present day, however that didn’t make them financial technique of trade. Schurtz noticed many gray areas of their monetization. “Beads made from clay and stone are additionally crafted by indigenous individuals and extensively used as ornaments, however hardly ever as cash” (p. 78).
The communities that Schurtz mentioned didn’t use written contracts, maintain debt information or use account-keeping in a managerial function for useful resource allocation, so cash’s perform as a typical of valuation didn’t play a task in Schurtz’s survey. However subsequent archeological analysis has revealed that cash’s emergence as a part of an total institutional framework can’t be understood regardless of written account-keeping, denominating debt accruals and monetary relations. Cash, credit score/debt and monetary obligations have all gone collectively because the origins of written information within the historic Close to East.[4]
Schurtz’s Distinction Between Inside Cash and Outdoors Cash
Trade with outsiders usually was performed by chieftains because the face of their communities to the surface world. Commerce (and likewise fee of tribute) concerned fiscal and social relations whose financial capabilities differed from these of the home financial system however ended up dovetailing with them to offer cash a hybrid character. Schurtz distinguished what he referred to as outdoors cash from inside cash, with outdoors cash in the end dominating the within financial system. “The idea of cash,” he wrote (p. 6), originated
from two distinct sources: What capabilities as the muse of wealth and measure of worth for belongings inside a tribe and serves social ends is, in its origins, one thing fully completely different from the technique of trade that journey from tribe to tribe and finally remodel themselves, as universally accepted commodity, right into a sort of cash.
Inside cash was used inside communities for their very own trade and wealth. Outdoors cash derived from transactions with outsiders. And what was “outdoors” was a set of practices governing commerce outdoors the jurisdiction of native authorities.[5] Schurtz’s distinction emphasised a attribute of commerce that has continued down via in the present day’s world: the distinction between home funds topic to checks and balances to guard primary wants and recognizing standing hierarchies however (ideally) limiting sharp wealth disparities, and trade with outsiders, usually performed on islands, quay areas or different venues socially outdoors the group’s boundaries, topic to extra impersonal standardized guidelines.
All through the traditional world we discover offshore island entrepots wherever these are conveniently positioned for conducting commerce with outsiders. They stored international contact at arm’s size in order to stop mercantile relations from disturbing native financial stability. Egypt restricted international contacts to the Delta area the place the Nile flowed into the Mediterranean. For the Etruscans, the island of Ischia/Pithekoussai turned the bottom for Phoenician and Greek retailers to cope with the Italian mainland within the 8th and seventh centuries BC. North Germans appear to have performed the Baltic amber commerce by means of the sacred island of Helgoland.
The Tendency of Outdoors Cash to Turn out to be Basic-Function Cash
“The emergence of specific inner financial programs is all over the place supported by the inclination to additionally remodel the surface cash into inside cash,” Schurtz concluded (p. 111). And in his earlier chapter “Metallic as Decoration and Cash” he identified that it was international commerce that led metallic to turn out to be the first type of cash. “Whereas most varieties of decorative cash step by step lose their significance, one among them, metallic cash, asserts its floor all of the extra, and eventually pushes its opponents out of the sphere” (p. 82). He added that: “Treasured metallic cash just isn’t a pure signal cash; it’s concurrently a helpful commodity, whose worth depends upon provide and demand, as a result of it embodies, in its mature kind, the fusion of inside cash with outdoors cash, of worth indicators and worth possession with the technique of trade” (p. 83).[6]
This merging of inside and outdoors cash is documented already within the third millennium BC within the Close to East. Silver cash was used for long-distance commerce and got here for use for home enterprise as nicely, whereas grain remained the financial car for denominating agrarian manufacturing, taxes and debt service on the land and for distribution to dependent labor in Mesopotamia’s temples and palaces.
Schurtz additionally posed the query of whether or not the dominance of metallic cash emerged spontaneously in lots of locations, or whether or not there was a diffusion from a singular origin, that’s, “whether or not a cultural establishment has grown in situ or whether or not it has been transferred from different areas via the migration of and phone between societies” (p. 117). The diffusion of Mesopotamian weights related to silver factors to its diffusion from that area, as does the unfold of the area’s follow of setting rates of interest merely for ease of calculation when it comes to the native fractional arithmetic system (60ths in Mesopotamia for a shekel per mina a month, 10ths or percentages in decimalized Greece. and 12ths in Rome for a troy ounce per pound annually).
Checks and Balances to Forestall the Egocentric Focus of Wealth
What do appear to have developed spontaneously had been social attitudes and insurance policies to stop the focus of wealth from injuring financial stability. Wealth focus, particularly when achieved by depriving cultivators of their technique of livelihood, would have violated the ethic of mutual assist that low-surplus economies want as a situation for his or her resilience.
Viewing cash as a part of the general social context, Schurtz described “the social transformation caused by wealth” on account of monetizing commerce and its industrial
pursuit of revenue [Erwerbssinn]. … everyone seems to be now both compelled to affix the competitors for belongings or they are going to be pulled into the vortex created by one of many newly rising facilities of energy and possession, and should work laborious to have the ability to dwell in any respect. For the house owners, there is no such thing as a temporal boundary hindering the perpetual multiplication of their wealth (p. 38).
Schurtz characterised the financial mentality as a drive for “the limitless accumulation of movable belongings,” to be handed on to 1’s kids resulting in the creation of a rich hereditary class. If archaic societies had this ethic, might civilization have taken off? How did they forestall the expansion of wealth from fostering an oligarchy in search of to extend its wealth on the expense of the group at massive and its resilience.
Schurtz reviewed how indigenous communities usually averted that destiny by shaping a social worth system that might steer wealth away from getting used to attain predatory energy over others. He cited quite a few examples wherein “[i]mmense treasures usually accumulate with out reentering the circulate of day by day life.”
One widespread method to do that was merely to bury wealth. “The primitive man,” he wrote, “believes he could have entry to the mass of products given to him within the grave, even within the afterlife. Subsequently, he additionally doesn’t know a restrict to acquisition” (p. 38). Taking his greed and wealth with him to make use of within the hereafter prevents hoarded wealth from being inherited “and finally develop[ing] right into a harmful instrument of energy” by changing into dynastic; “it operates on the assumption that the deceased doesn’t in any method hand over his rights of possession and jealously guards over his property, in order that no inheritor helps themselves to it” (p. 42).
A much less damaging elimination of wealth from its house owners was to create an ethic of peer strain wherein people gained standing and standard acclaim by accumulating wealth to offer away. “Initially and for a very long time,” Schurtz wrote,
remainders of the traditional communism are alive sufficient to successfully forestall any makes an attempt to amass as many belongings as potential right into a single hand, and certainly in locations with out an precise system of debt and curiosity, the highly effective particular person, in whose home the tributes of the individuals circulate collectively, finds himself with little selection however to “show” his wealth or, in different phrases, to permit the individuals to take part in its enjoyment. (p. 39, italics added).
Such a person achieves philanthropic renown by generously distributing his possessions “to his associates and followers, profitable their hearts and thereby establishing a preferred and real energy, based mostly on loyal allegiance.” One widespread follow was to rejoice marriages, funerals and different rites of passage by offering nice feasts, “a unprecedented dissipation and squandering of owned worth, notably livestock and meals, throughout these grand festivals of the lifeless that developed out of sacrifices and are, amongst some peoples, not solely an efficient impediment to the buildup of wealth, however have became financial calamities” when households really feel obliged to tackle debt to host such extravagant shows (p. 43).
Non secular officers and temples usually performed a task in such rituals. Noting that “cash, commerce, and faith had a very good relationship with each other” in antiquity (p. 35), Schurtz cited the follow of donating wealth to temples or their priesthoods. However he acknowledged that this would possibly allow them to “acquire overpowering affect via the possession of cash” underneath their management (p. 37).
“Usually, the traditional communist countermeasures towards wealth don’t endure,” Schurtz wrote. “Sure sorts of property appear to favor greed instantly, particularly cattle farming, which might actually flip right into a hoarding dependancy” (p. 41). And he described communalistic values of mutual assist as tending to interrupt down as economies polarized with the rise in industrial wealth. Schurtz additionally famous that the social checks on private wealth-seeking that he described didn’t apply to economies that developed a “system of debt and curiosity” (see p. 39 cited above). Wealth within the type of financial claims on debtors was not buried, and hardly may very well be redistributed to the inhabitants at massive, whose members usually had been debtors to the rising creditor curiosity.
The one technique to forestall such money owed from polarizing society was to cancel them. That’s what Close to Japanese rulers did, however Schurtz’s era had no method of figuring out about their Clear Slate proclamations. Beginning with the very outset of debt information ca. 2500 BC in Sumer, and persevering with down via Babylonia, Assyria and their neighbors down via the early first millennium BC, rulers annulled monetary claims on agrarian debtors. That prevented collectors from concentrating cash and land in their very own palms.
One would possibly say that these debt cancellations and land redistributions had been the Close to Japanese different to destroying materials wealth to protect stability. These royal acts didn’t destroy bodily wealth, however merely worn out the debt overhead in order to keep up widespread land tenure and liberty for the inhabitants at massive. Cancelling agrarian debt was politically possible as a result of most private money owed had been owed to the palace sector and its temples or their officers.
Royal Clear Slates appeared so unthinkable after they started to be translated across the flip of the final century that early readers hardly might consider that they really had been enforced in follow. Thureau-Dangin’s French translation of the Sumerian ruler Enmetena’s (ca. 2400 BC) proclamation in 1905 was believed by many observers to be too utopian and socially disruptive to have been adopted in follow, as was the Biblical Jubilee 12 months of Leviticus 25.[7] However so many such proclamations have been discovered, extending so repeatedly over 1000’s of years – together with lawsuits wherein judges upheld their growing element – that there is no such thing as a doubt that these acts did certainly reconcile the buildup of financial wealth with social resilience by blocking the creation of predatory oligarchies similar to would emerge in classical Greece and Rome and certainly survive into in the present day’s world.
Financial Improvements within the Bronze Age Close to Japanese Palaces and Temples
Financial documentation in Schurtz’s day was in a position to hint financial follow solely way back to classical Greece and Rome. There was a common perception that their practices should have developed from indigenous Indo-European audio system. Marcel Mauss would quickly deal with the reward trade of the Kwakiutl tribe of the Canadian Pacific Northwest (with their aggressive one-upmanship) because the prototype for the concept of charging curiosity.[8] However financial curiosity has a selected stipulated fee, with funds due on particular periodic dates set by written contracts. That follow stems from Sumer within the third millennium BC, together with silver (and grain) cash and associated monetary improvements within the financial Large Bang that has formed subsequent Western financial evolution.
Close to Japanese fiscal and monetary information describe a growth of cash, credit score and interest-bearing debt that neither the barter idea nor Schurtz’s ethnographic research had imagined. Mesopotamia’s “full-fledged” cash developed out of the fiscal group of account-keeping and credit score within the palaces and temples of Sumer, Babylonia and their Bronze Age neighbors (3200-1200 BC).
These Close to Japanese economies had been bigger in scale and rather more complicated and multi-layered than the indigenous communities surveyed by Schurtz. In distinction to these largely self-sufficient communities, southern Mesopotamia was obliged to have interaction in large-scale long-distance commerce, as a result of the area’s river-deposited soil lacked metallic, stone and even hardwood. The area’s wants for uncooked supplies was far completely different from the commerce and “monetization” of luxuries by the comparatively small-scale and self-sufficient communities studied by Schurtz and hypothesized by economists imagining people bartering at their native market. In these communities, he famous: “Nearly all the time the quantity of metallic formed into ornaments far outweighs the quantity remodeled into sensible instruments”(p. 82). Mesopotamia’s commerce needed to go far past private ornamental luxuries and status commodities or trophy objects.
An entrepreneurial service provider class was wanted to acquire these uncooked supplies, together with a specialised labor power, which was employed by the temples and palaces that produced most export handicrafts, provisioned corvée labor to work on public infrastructure, served as mints and overseers of weights and measures, and mediated most financial wealth and debt. Their massive scale required ahead planning and account-keeping to feed and provide labor (conflict widows, orphans and slaves) of their weaving and different handicraft workshops, and to consign their output to retailers for export.
Calculating the price of distributing meals and uncooked supplies inside these massive establishments and valuing their consignment of products to retailers required designing customary weights and measures as the premise for this ahead planning. Choosing financial items was principally a part of this standardization of measuring prices and worth. This made potential calculation of anticipated rental revenue or shortfalls, together with profit-and-loss statements and stability sheets.
The standard commodity to be distributed was grain, which served as a typical of worth for agrarian transactions and credit score balances that mounted up through the crop 12 months for advances to sharecroppers, consumption similar to beer from ale-women, and funds to monks for performing ceremonial capabilities. Their worth in grain was to be paid at harvest time. Calculation of meals rations for distribution to the varied grades of labor (male, feminine and youngsters) enabled the prices to be expressed in grain or in workday equivalents.
Schurtz would have referred to as this grain “inside cash,” and considered “outdoors cash” the silver minted by temples for coping with international commerce and because the primary measure of worth for enterprise transactions with the palace financial system and for settling industrial obligations. A mina (60 shekels) of silver was set as equal to a corresponding unit of grain as measured on the threshing flooring. That enabled accounts to be stored concurrently in silver and grain. The consequence was a bimonetary grain-silver customary reflecting the bifurcation of early Mesopotamian economies between the agrarian households on the land (utilizing grain “inside cash”) and the palatial financial system with its workshops, international commerce and related industrial enterprise (utilizing silver “outdoors cash”). Costs for market transactions with outsiders would possibly fluctuate, however costs for debt funds, taxes and different transactions with the big establishments had been fastened.
Schurtz’s conclusion that the rising dominance of economic cash tended to interrupt down home checks and balances defending the indigenous communities that he studied is certainly what occurred when industrial debt practices had been introduced from the Close to East to the Aegean and Mediterranean lands across the 8th century BC. Having no custom of royal debt cancellations as had existed within the Close to East ever because the formative interval of interest-bearing debt, the ensuing decontextualization of credit score practices fostered monetary oligarchies in classical Greece and Rome. After early debt cancellations and land redistribution by populist “tyrants” within the 7th and 6th centuries BC, the following classical oligarchies resisted standard revolts demanding a revival of such insurance policies.
The dynamics of interest-bearing debt and the pro-creditor debt legal guidelines of classical antiquity’s creditor oligarchies precipitated financial polarization that led to 5 centuries of civil warfare. These upheavals weren’t the results of the coinage that started to be minted across the 8th century BC, as many 19th-century observers believed, mistakenly considering that Aegean coinage was the primary metallic cash. Silver cash had been the norm for 2 millennia all through the Close to East, with out inflicting disruption like that skilled by classical antiquity. What polarized classical antiquity’s economies had been pro-creditor debt legal guidelines backed by political violence, not cash as such.
Conclusion and Dialogue
Schurtz’s start line was how communities organized the legal guidelines of movement governing their distribution of wealth and property. He seen cash as rising from this institutional perform with a principally communalistic ethic. A key attribute of indigenous financial resilience was social strain anticipating the rich to contribute to social assist. That was the situation set by unwritten customs for letting some people and their households turn out to be wealthy. Schurtz and subsequent ethnologists discovered a common answer for reconciling wealth-seeking with community-wide prosperity to be social strain for rich households (that was the fundamental unit, not people) to distribute their wealth to the citizenry by reward trade, mutual assist and offering massive feasts, particularly for rites of passage.
This was a much wider view than the individualistic financial assumption that non-public gain-seeking and certainly selfishness was the driving power of total prosperity. The concept of monetizing financial life underneath communalistic mutual-aid or palace route was and stays anathema to mainstream economists, reflecting the worldview of contemporary collectors and monetary elites. Schurtz acknowledged that mercantile wealth-seeking required checks and balances to stop economies from impoverishing their members. The issue for any efficiently rising society to resolve was forestall the undue focus of wealth obtained by exploitative signifies that impaired total welfare and the power of group members to be self-supporting. In any other case, financial polarization and dependency would lead members to flee from the group, or maybe it merely would shrink and find yourself being defeated by outsiders who sustained themselves by extra profitable mutual assist.
As famous above, Schurtz handled the monetization of wealth within the type of creditor claims on debtors as too post-archaic to be a attribute of his ethnographic topics. However what formed the context for monetization and led “outdoors cash” to take precedence over inside cash had been wealth accumulation by moneylending and the fiscal and navy makes use of of cash.
Schurtz appropriately rejected (p. 6) the characterization of cash as growing in phases, from small-scale barter to monetized economies changing into extra subtle as they developed into financialized credit score economies.[9] And in reality the precise historic sequence was the reverse. From Mesopotamia to medieval Europe, agrarian economies operated on credit score through the crop 12 months. Financial fee occurred at harvest time to settle the obligations that had collected because the final harvest and to pay taxes. This must pay money owed was a significant component requiring cash’s growth within the first place.
Barter turned antiquity’s closing financial “stage” as Rome’s financial system collapsed after its creditor oligarchy imposed debt bondage and took management of the land. When emperors had been unable to tax this oligarchy, they debased the coinage and life all through the Empire devolved into native subsistence manufacturing and quasi-barter. International commerce was primarily for luxuries introduced by Arabs and different Close to Easterners. The optimistic sequence that Hildebrand imagined not solely mistakenly adopted the barter fable of financial origins, however did not take debt polarization under consideration as economies turned monetarized and financialized.
Schurtz described how the purpose of stopping the maldistribution of wealth was on the coronary heart of indigenous social structuring. Nevertheless it broke down for varied causes. Economies wherein household wealth took the type of cattle, he discovered, tended to turn out to be more and more oppressive with a view to preserve the polarizing inequality that developed. The identical is likely to be stated of credit score economies underneath the rising burden of interest-bearing debt. Schurtz famous the follow of charging debtors double the mortgage worth – and any fee of curiosity certainly includes an implicit doubling time. That exponential dynamic is what polarizes financialized economies.
Mainstream economists of Schurtz’s era averted coping with the impact of financial innovation and debt on the distribution of wealth. The tendency was to deal with cash as merely a “veil” of worth modifications for items and providers, with out analyzing how credit score polarizes the financial system’s stability sheet of belongings and debt liabilities. But the distinguishing characteristic of credit score economies was the usage of moneylending as a lever to complement collectors by impoverishing debtors. That was greater than only a financial downside. It was a political creditor/debtor downside, and in the end a public/non-public downside. At subject was whether or not a ruler or civic public checks would steer the rise in financial wealth in ways in which averted the creation of creditor oligarchies.
Most 19th-century and even subsequent financial writers shied from confronting this political context, leaving it probably the most obvious hole in fashionable financial evaluation. It was left to the invention of cuneiform documentation to know how cash first turned institutionalized as a car to pay money owed. This monetization was accompanied by a exceptional success in sustaining rising wealth whereas stopping its focus within the palms of a hereditary oligarchy.
That Close to Japanese success highlights what the smaller and extra anarchic Western economies failed to attain when interest-bearing debt practices had been delivered to the Mediterranean lands with out being checked by the custom of normal cancellation of non-public non-business debt. Credit score and financial wealth had been privatized within the palms of what turned an more and more self-destructive set of classical oligarchies culminating in that of Rome which fought for hundreds of years towards standard revolts in search of safety from impoverishing financial polarization.
The devastating results of transplanting Close to Japanese debt practices into the Mediterranean world’s much less communalistic groupings exhibits the necessity to talk about the political, fiscal and social-moral context for cash and debt. Schurtz positioned financial evaluation within the context of society’s political establishments and ethical values, and defined how cash is a product of this context, and certainly, how monetization tends to rework it – in a method that tends to interrupt down social safety.
His guide has remained comparatively unknown during the last century largely as a result of his institutional anthropological perspective is simply too broad for an economics self-discipline that has been narrowed by pro-creditor ideologues who’ve applauded the “free market” destruction of social regulation geared toward defending the pursuits of debtors. That angle avoids recognizing the challenges that led the indigenous communities studied by Schurtz, and later the formative Bronze Age Close to East, to guard their resilience towards the focus of wealth, a phenomenon that has plagued economies ever since classical antiquity’s decontextualization of Close to Japanese debt practices.
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[1] Carl Menger, “On the Origins of Cash,” Financial Journal, 2 (1892):238-255 [Original in 1871]. The barter idea has been refuted by fashionable analysis uncovering the Bronze Age Close to Japanese institutional origins of cash, which I talk about in Chapters 1 and three of Temples of Enterprise: Creating Financial Order within the Bronze Age Close to East (Dresden, ISLET, 2024), esp. my criticisms of this idea in “Origins of Cash and Curiosity: Palatial Credit score, not Barter,” in Battilossi, S., Cassis, Y., Yago, Ok., eds., Handbook of the Historical past of Cash and Forex(Springer, 2020):45-65.
[2] See the papers collected in L. Randall Wray, ed., Credit score and State Theories of Cash: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes (Cheltenham UK, 2004).
[3] Marcel Mauss, The Reward (New York, 1952 [1925]), and Bernard Laum, Heiliges Geld: eine historiche Untersuchung über den sakralen Ursprung des Geldes (Tübingen, 1924). Schurtz mentions spit-money in passing however finds commerce in meals comparatively unimportant.
[4] See “The Growth of Cash-of-Account in Sumer’s Temples,” in Michael Hudson and Cornelia Wunsch, eds., Creating Financial Order: Report-Preserving, Standardization and the Growth of Accounting within the Historic Close to East (CDL Press, Bethesda, 2004, now ISLET, Dresden, 2023):303-329.
[5] I talk about this in “From Sacred Enclave to Temple to Metropolis,” in Urbanization and Land Possession within the Historic Close to East (ed. with Baruch Levine, Cambridge, Mass: Peabody Museum (Harvard), 1999):117-146, and Chapter 10 of Temples of Enterprise.
[6] Schurtz (pp. 28-29) cited for example of how financial authorities might substitute signal cash for metallic cash the case of “Kublai Khan, the ruler of the Mongolian empire, [who] drove out metallic cash with signal cash, particularly stamped items of paper, evidently following the Chinese language instance; Marco Polo’s accounts point out that the endeavor should have briefly succeeded in gentle of the super energy and authority of the ruler, with the consequence being an unlimited accumulation of gold and silver within the Khan’s residence.” However he made disparaging remarks concerning the French authorities’s paper cash assignats and referred to as John Legislation a fraudster, dismissing authorities cash creation.
[7] Francois Thureau-Dangin, Les Inscriptions de Sumer et d’Akkad (Paris, 1905):86-87 translated the Sumerian time period for justice (amargi) to imply particularly that officers and rich people (“the highly effective”) would haven’t any authorized claims for debt foreclosures.
[8] Marcel Mauss, The Reward (New York, 1952 [1925]).
[9] Bruno Hildebrand, “Pure-, Geld- und Kreditwirtschaft,” Jahrbücher für Nationalokönomie und Statistik 6 (1864) categorised economies as passing from Naturalwirtschaft (barter financial system) to Geldwirtschaft (gold/commodity cash financial system) and eventually Kreditwirtschaft (credit score financial system).
