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This article explores the conception and execution of paper currency schemes in Tokugawa Japan (1603–1868). Paper currency was widely used as a form of local money in early modern Japan, but has received close to no attention in Anglophone scholarship even amid a recent upsurge in interest in the global history of money. From the perspective of monetary history, Tokugawa paper currency presents an intriguing puzzle. Even as paper currencies repeatedly collapsed in value, they remained in common use as an essential component of the early modern monetary system. Using the case of Sendai domain, a large fiefdom in northeastern Japan, the article argues that the monetary practices and expectations of ordinary subjects transformed paper money, created through partnerships between the samurai ruling class and powerful merchant financiers, from a tool meant to serve the interests of state finances into a low‐denomination currency convenient for everyday transactions, resulting in the bills' surprising longevity as a form of small change. Drawing on approaches that centre the role of non‐state and marginal actors in the making of money, it sheds new light on the political economy of late Tokugawa Japan and offers new insights into the global history of money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to provide insight into the history and acceptance of paper money within British North America by examining the state money issued by Lower Canada's civil government and the British Army during the War of 1812. Prior to the war, British North America was suffering from a specie shortage that was further exacerbated by the need for significant expenditure increases to provision the state with the resources it needed for its war effort. In response, colonial authorities issued the Army Bills, a paper money that was backed by acceptance in paying public debts and duties while also possessing qualities that adhered to metalist principles. To many observers surprise, the money successfully circulated and was accepted by Lower Canada's colonists, who beforehand had largely been perceived by colonial officials as distrusting of paper money. This research argues that the state's acceptance of Army Bills for discharging public debts, particularly merchant duties, ensured that the money would provide the colonial government with the fiscal flexibility it needed to conduct its war effort. This provision, in addition to measures like legal tender laws protecting its use in private transactions, also supported its successful circulation within the colonial economy during the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Bálint Hóman’s figure has become much more widely known for his political involvement than for his qualities as a historian. Gábor Ujváry’s study characterizes his work from the latter perspective, which rightfully earned him extraordinary recognition during the interwar period. His books and essays are often cited to this day, and although time has passed over them – as is the case with almost every historical analysis that has seen the light of day a hundred years ago – in many respects, some have proven enduring. Among these are his 1916 work on Hungarian monetary history during the Árpádian era, as well as his 1921 volume on the economic history of King Charles Robert’s reign. Moreover, his methodological writings contain numerous observations that remain thought-provoking to this day. His most famous work, the jointly authored Hungarian History with Gyula Szekfû, has educated generations, and although many of its assertions have been nuanced or refuted since, it remains regarded as the most cohesive and beautifully written synthesis of Hungarian history up to the early 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a case study of how the Renminbi won the currency war in Shanghai between 1949 and 1950. This case study supports the proposition of chartalism and MMT that money is a creature of the state, and in two ways deepens our understanding of the role of the state in the sovereign currency system. First, taxation is not the only way to drive money. The Shanghai government also drove money by supplying goods. Second, the outcome of a currency war depends on many historical factors, and the government plays an important role by changing the conventions that shape people's monetary behavior. The Shanghai government adopted anti-inflation policies to transform the conventions of valuing commodities and metallic currencies over paper currencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Informacion Comercial Espanola Revista de Economia is the property of S.G.E.E.I.P.C., Secretaria de Estado de Comercio, Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Historia Económica / Journal of Iberian & Latin American Economic History is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article provides a new answer to one of the central questions in precolonial West African histories: the interaction of credit with the expansion of production for the market. According to Hopkins, during the nineteenth century long-distance commercial capital had a limited effect on West African local production. In contrast, this article argues that surplus trading profits played a crucial role in the growth of manufacturing. However, to fully appreciate the interaction of trading profits and local manufacturing, it is necessary to reconsider the approach to West African monetary history. Recently, world economic historians have devoted renewed attention to African monetary history, suggesting a new theoretical approach that enables a reconsideration of how multiple monetary transactions worked in practice. This approach is based on the "complementary" relationship among monies circulating side by side. This article argues that a complementary relationship between multiple markets and monies makes possible the articulation of a different perspective on the place of money within the process of economic growth in precolonial savanna economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"In Defence of the Nominalist Ontology of Money" by Geoffrey Ingham (published by the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics in 2021) contends that "Historicising the Money of Account: A Critique of the Nominalist Ontology of Money" (published by the same journal in 2020) is based on misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and imprecisions. The core proposition in "Historicising the Money of Account" is that the money of account, which is generally understood to be a universal attribute of money, is in fact an institution of late medieval and early modern times that has no significant equivalent in today's world (or in the ancient world, for that matter). This reply is intended to provide further clarification on the historical and ontological specificity of the late medieval institution of the money of account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses historical evidence from the Potosi mint and Massachusetts Bay mint that illustrates the importance of the resource endowment (in this case silver) for the provision of small change. We show that the availability of silver was fundamental in shaping incentives. The relative scarcity of silver in Massachusetts Bay contributed to the small scale of the mint's operations, and implied that neither the monetary authority nor the mintmaster faced a significant tradeoff between drawing seigniorage from the mint and the production of small-denomination coins. In contrast, in the Viceroyalty of Peru, the abundance of silver, and the consequent large level of production of the mint's heavy peso coin, heightened the tradeoff between the fiscal and monetary objectives of the coinage. We suggest that these incentives negatively affected the production of fractionary coinage in the Peruvian viceroyalty, whereas in Massachusetts Bay the production of small-denomination coins was the norm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract I assess the stability of the monetary environment in Switzerland over the past two centuries. In order to control for transitory measurement errors, in particular in nineteenth century data, I use an unobserved-components stochastic-volatility model to extract the permanent trends from several nominal variables. The descriptive analysis of these trends suggests that the current monetary regime, flexible inflation targeting, provided a relatively stable monetary environment. Although the trends are quite stable for the nineteenth century, the estimates are imprecise. We should therefore be cautious when characterizing metal currency regimes as providing a stable monetary environment. A discussion of the results shows that the apparent success of flexible inflation targeting poses new challenges for the implementation of monetary policy because the trend decline in inflation was associated with a trend decline in nominal interest rates.

The paper examines the direction, magnitude and dynamics of bullion and monetary flows in the Viceroyalty of New Granada (present-day Colombia and Ecuador), the largest gold producer of the Spanish empire, during the late colonial period. The paper interweaves notarial records and little-explored post office accounts to craft a preliminary, yet novel, monetary geography of the region. It identifies the cities and regions that agglomerated the flows of gold and silver in the form of bullion and coins. The paper pursues a mostly empirical goal. It seeks to provide materials and insights to further study the mechanics of bimetallism in the region. The article suggests that bullion markets had a broader scope across distant regions than previously thought. The paper, then, supports the claim of recent scholars who have studied the flow of consumer goods in showing that the Northern Andes were much more integrated. Therefore, it is necessary to abandon the present-day national borders framework to analyze the north Andean economies.

For the past fifty years, there has been a debate over whether the Umayyad caliph Muʿāwiya introduced a short-lived gold coinage in Syria. After reappraising the literary evidence, this study argues that an enigmatic phrase in a papyrus from this period constitutes evidence for state enforcement of the circulation of a new kind of gold coinage issued under Muʿāwiya. A die-study of the extant specimens of a peculiar imitation of Byzantine gold which has had its crosses effaced, and has been attributed to Muʿāwiya on the basis of the testimony of literary sources, confirms them to be the result of a large-scale, albeit ultimately unsuccessful, initiative. This demonstrates that, in addition to the east, there also existed a separate drive towards an expansion of the money supply in Syria-Egypt during the latter half of Muʿāwiya's caliphate, a development which testifies to a relatively substantial programme of state-building by the caliph. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steven Horwitz's book, Microfoundations and Macroeconomics has been at the center of the post-crisis revival of Austrian business cycle theory. Much of the work that has been done on this topic has either extended or refined Horwitz's framework. This paper's aim is more modest. In it, I apply Horwitz's framework to the Confederate monetary experience during the U.S. Civil War. While there was an excess supply of money, I do not find any evidence that it generated a credit boom - quite the contrary. That said, there is evidence of forced savings, which the state and Confederate governments used to fund large-scale investment projects, among other things. While this is not malinvestment in the traditional sense, I argue that allocating credit in response to political incentives is unlikely to result in a sustainable capital structure. This finding points to the need to incorporate the notions of forced savings and malinvestment into a broader political-economy perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the collapse of Saambou bank in February 2002, contagion rapidly spread amongst South African small and medium-sized banks. By the end of 2003, half of the country's banks had deregistered. The paper constructs a unique monthly bank-level data set to show that the banks that failed were those with short-term liabilities from other financial institutions. An initial delay in providing liquidity to solvent banks in distress and raising interest rates may have exacerbated the crisis. The need for prompt, swift action echoes lessons from banking panics throughout history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The SA Reserve Bank (SARB) was created as a result of an earlier gold standard monetary crisis that unfolded after World War I. From 1919, South Africa nominally maintained the gold standard, but not the conversion of banknotes into gold. This article seeks to discuss the SARB's views on the gold standard controversy, and to highlight the different attitudes of the first two governors, Clegg and Postmus, attitudes that have not previously been examined in the literature. It will also discuss the way in which the Bank of England misled Clegg, and how the views expressed privately differed from those in the SARB's Ordinary General Meeting (OGM) documentation. This paper considers the irony that Clegg was selected from the ranks of the Bank of England and was loyal to Threadneedle Street, but defended a monetary policy which aided one of the biggest constituencies of the Afrikaner Nationalist Party – Afrikaner farmers. By contrast, Postmus was previously at the Nederlandsche Bankvoor Zuid-Afrika, and supported the National Party position that South Africa should return to, and remain on, a gold standard independent of Britain. Despite this, Postmus's policy turned out to be disastrous for the mostly Afrikaner farmers affected by the 1931–1932 crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article puts forward a case against the nominalist ontology of money, that is, the heterodox notion that moneyness – the quality of being money – is conferred by the money of account. From the nominalist perspective, money is essentially a balance-sheet phenomenon: a credit-debit bookkeeping entity whose origins can be traced back to ancient Near Eastern practices of accounting. This ontological position, which is often erroneously traced back to Keynes' Treatise, mystifies and obscures the actual history of the money of account as a regime of monetary governance and a mode of speculation that only made sense in the European late medieval context of bimetallism. The article thus provides a critique of monetary nominalism based on Keynes' reflection on the value of money in the Treatise and the General Theory. In turn, it proceeds to historicize the phenomenon of the money of account, building on the seminal contributions of Marc Bloch and Luigi Einaudi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Making Money and Money in the Western Legal Tradition provide an extensive analysis of the monetary systems of medieval, renaissance and modern Europe. They use an analytical framework that emphasizes the legal, political, and financial aspects of monetary mechanics and show convincingly that monetary systems are made and planned. Modern monetary systems did not emerge from an impersonal process of trial and error driven by market exchanges among free and equal individuals. The unit of account and accompanying monetary instruments have legal and political origins. The emergence and evolution of modern monetary systems since Ancient Mesopotamia is a story of power relations with an authority that aims at redirecting some of the economic output by imposing dues on the population. Post Keynesian readers will approach these books with Keynes's framework in mind and will be pleased to see that it does hold well against historical evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Historia Actual is the property of Asociacion de Historia Actual and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Article XVI of the Acts of Union of 1706 and 1707 created a monetary union by merging the Scottish monetary system with the sterling monetary system of England and Wales. It completed a process that began after the 1603 regal union between the two kingdoms. Its main purpose was to restore the circulating currency in Scotland and England to the same monetary standard, something which had been an aim of Scottish monetary policy since the early decades of the regal union. The monetary union of 1707 raised difficult numismatic and legal problems in the way prices were quoted, debts were paid and accounts were kept. The monetary events of 1707 illustrate how the legal conception of a monetary union can mean different things in different historical periods. Modern-day legal understandings of monetary union cannot be projected into the past when monetary systems were based on coins struck from intrinsically valuable metals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changing the value of money was used, from the first moment of the Restoration, as a means of financing war and monarchy. Absent in the Philippine period, when there was stability in the Portuguese monetary standard, the mutationist practice was seen as unwanted, dangerous, and immoral. Nevertheless, the needs of the time led the monarchy to delegate its monetary policy to the Conselho da Fazenda (Treasury Council), where thinking about the currency was not only adequate to the needs of power games, but also adjusted to the new ideas, especially those originating from the so-called Salamanca School. Studying the first mutating initiatives (1640-42) allows us to understand how monetary practices evolved in Portugal to a policy of adjustment and resurgence of the national monetary system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tiempo y Economía is the property of La Fundacion Universidad de Bogota Jorge Tadeo Lozano and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper's aim is a historiographical review and an analysis of the basic works published by Bulgarian scholars and devoted to the topic of money and prices in the Ottoman Balkans during the 18th and 19th centuries. This period is very important, both in a more general context -- from a European and Ottoman perspective, as well as from a Balkan and Bulgarian point of view. We have used a chronological approach and have outlined two periods in our study -- between 1878 and 1989 (the time of the Third Bulgarian Kingdom and the subsequent communist regime in Bulgaria) and from 1990 until today (i.e. the period after the democratic changes). The reviewed studies are divided into two main groups: (i) historical studies on money and prices and (ii) numismatic ones. We have given priority to some smaller publications, as they are less known to Bulgarian and foreign researchers. In general, larger studies are known to scholars dealing with the region's monetary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A project to build a comprehensive database of the Bank of France's published accounts covering its entire history was launched in 2001 with the support of the Bank's Mission Historique. This article introduces its main outcome: a dataset based on the weekly balance sheets – the so-called situations hebdomadaires – covering more than a century and a half of history from 1840 to 1998. After a brief outline of the historical evolution of the Bank's legal status and a description of the publication outlets for the data, the article pays special attention to the issues of transparency and accountability. For that purpose, it reconstructs on the basis of archival records the debate over the disclosure of the Bank's figures (what to publish, how frequently) that took place, both within the Bank and between the Bank and the government, at various turning points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finally, the article explains how the presentation of the situations changed over time, paying special attention to the impact of World Wars I and II. The full database with metadata information is attached to the electronic version of this article and downloadable as an Excel file from the FHR website, together with an extensive review of the literature on the history of the Bank of France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revue Economique is the property of Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The British monetary authorities have traditionally focused on broader monetary aggregates than their counterparts elsewhere. The reasons include: the willingness of UK banks to allow customers to make payments by drawing on time deposits, the particularities of the UK approach to managing the national debt and the foreign exchange reserves, and the flow-of-funds system of national accounts developed after World War II. This article outlines these reasons, and explores the implications for the UK's often fractious relationship with the International Monetary Fund during the 1950s and 1960s. It explains why IMF conditionality on loans to the UK focused on broad aggregates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores long-term trends in risks and returns within central banking using Danmarks Nationalbank as a case study. Core earnings generated by the basic functions and the associated risks typical of a central bank accounted on average for most of the Nationalbank's financial returns over the past 175 years. For a long period, this was the result of a passive risk-management strategy under which financial risks and returns just reflected the various functions performed by the Nationalbank and not the outcome of a deliberate decision-making process. A formalised and holistic risk-management framework was introduced only in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper discusses a hoard of Swedish copper coins discovered using metal detector in 2013 in Vaidavere, eastern Estonia. 11 104 coins were hidden in the ground in a wooden box. Youngest of the coins were minted in the year 1654. Vast majority of the hoard consists of ¼ öre from the reign of queen Christina. 10 coins were struck for King Gustav II Adolf. Oldest coins of the hoard are from the year 1624. Considering the numer of the coins, Vaidavere hoard is the largest in Estonia and it also represents a largest hoard of seventeenth-century Swedish copper coins ever to have reached public collections. The owner of Vaidavere coins died probably during the Russo-Swedish War (1656-61), more precisely in the year 1656 when Russian troops conquered Tartu and looted neighbouring territories. Approximately 40 hoards discovered in Estonia can be associated with the hostile activities of the same war. The paper compares the composition of Vaidavere hoard to the composition of other larger seventeenth-century copper coin hoards unearthed in Estonia and neighbouring countries. Results of the study reveal that the composition of different ¼ öre find assemblages from Estonia and Ingria is largely similar and in good correlation with the production of different Swedish mints in different years. Weighing of ¼ öre from Vaidavere hoard revealed that their average weight was considerably lower than the officially fixed minted standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este trabajo pretende profundizar en el papel desempeñado por el trienio liberal en el proceso del tránsito del sistema monetario tradicional al moderno. Las fuentes primarias en las que se basa el estudio de la política monetaria de este periodo son, además de otras, las actas de la comisión parlamentaria que durante el trienio liberal aborda un proyecto de reforma del sistema monetario español heredado del antiguo régimen, y cuyos resultados se verán limitados por tres factores. En primer lugar, por la persistencia de fundamentos monetarios tradicionales; en segundo, por las dificultades para relacionar esta reforma con los debates monetarios que se están dando en los países más avanzados, especialmente Inglaterra y, en tercer lugar, por la brevedad del periodo y la restitución de la vieja política monetaria con la tarifa de Tolosa en 1823.This paper aims to deepen the role played by the liberal triennial in the process of transition from traditional to modern monetary. The main sources, which the study of the monetary policy in this period is based on, in addition to other, are the acts of the parliamentary committee that during the liberal triennial deals with a draft of a reform of the monetary system inherited from the ancient regime, which results will be constrained by three factors. First, by the persistence of traditional monetary fundamentals, secondly, by difficulties in linking this monetary reform with the discussions that were taking place in the more developed countries, particularly in England, and, thirdly, the short duration of the period in which takes place and the restoration of the old monetary policy with the tariff of Tolosa in 1823.

The author reports in detail on the monetary history of Italy from 1935 to 1958. The author distinguishes among four sub-periods: from the building up of the world economy to the armistice (35-43); 2. The period of military occupation (September 1943-April 1945); 3. Early peacetime ebb and the flow of inflation (May 1945-September 1947); and 4. A decade of stability and growth (1948-1958). JEL: N14, O52

Although Carlo M. Cipolla’s book Le avventure della lira, which covers twelve centuries of monetary history, is very interesting and authoritative, it is also unlikely to to become available in English. The present article thus attempts to outline its substance and summarize the material that the book represents. JEL: E42, N13, N14

This article examines the interactions between two distinct currency systems that dominated the Deccan during the period c. 1350–1687—that of the Bahmani sultanate and its successor states, and that of the Vijayanagara kingdom and its successors. Based on a GIS database of over 300 reported coin hoards containing material issued by either state, the study demonstrates that while the Bahmani currency was limited in circulation to Bahmani territory, the coinage of Vijayanagara in contrast enjoyed wide circulation throughout the entire Deccan region. This was evidently due to a high demand in rural areas for the small, conveniently-sized gold coins of Vijayanagara known as hon, since gold coins of similar weight, purity and fabric had customarily been used throughout the Deccan to pay agricultural taxes since the late tenth century. By the opening years of the sixteenth century, agricultural and commercial taxes within the Bahmani territory were being assessed and collected in Vijayanagara-issued hons. The Vijayanagara hon circulated in such great numbers in Bahmani territory that it became an integral part of the economy of the Bahmanis and their successors, prompting Firishta to note (in 1607 CE) that ‘even up to the present day, that same infidel coinage is current among the Muslims’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This work demonstrates how two functions of currency, its measure of value and its role as a means of release from debt, have been weakened. Currency no longer has labor as a visible model, nor can it adhere to exchange, leading to debt and reciprocal obligations. The measure of money is thus lost and its representation of value is altered or no longer exists; it tends to depend on a status determined by its purchasing capacity. This change, which is also related to confidence in and the power of money, consists of disregarding the debt surrounding the currency and exclusively prioritizing the realization of benefits. This phenomenon dates back to the subordination of the major international currency to private interests, which now seem to be the general will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Economic History Research / Investigaciones de Historia Económica is the property of Asociacion Espanola de Historia Economica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)