History of money

History of money


The history of money spans thousands of years. Numismatics is the scientific study of money and its history in all its varied forms.

Many items have been used as commodity money such as naturally scarce precious metals, cowry shells, barley, beads etc., as well as many other things that are thought of as having value.

Modern money (and most ancient money) is essentially a token — in other words, an abstraction. Paper currency is perhaps the most common type of physical money today. However, objects of gold or silver present many of money's essential properties.
Non-monetary exchange: barter and gift
Contrary to popular conception, there is no evidence of a society or economy that relied primarily on barter.[1] Instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economics. When barter did in fact occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or would-be enemies.[2]

With barter, an individual possessing a material object of value, such as a measure of grain, could directly exchange that object for another object perceived to have equivalent value, such as a small animal, a clay pot or a tool. The capacity to carry out transactions is severely limited since it depends on a coincidence of wants. The seller of food grain has to find a buyer who wants to buy grain and who also could offer in return something the seller wants to buy. There is no common medium of exchange into which both seller and buyer could convert their tradable commodities. There is no standard which could be applied to measure the relative value of various goods and services.

In a gift economy, valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards (i.e. there is no formal quid pro quo).[3] Ideally, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community.

There are various social theories concerning gift economies. Some consider the gifts to be a form of reciprocal altruism. Another interpretation is that social status is awarded in return for the 'gifts'.[4] Consider for example, the sharing of food in some hunter-gatherer societies, where food-sharing is a safeguard against the failure of any individual's daily foraging. This custom may reflect altruism, it may be a form of informal insurance, or may bring with it social status or other benefits.