The History of Money

3,200 BCE O.S. – ongoing59 items

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“A Moneychanger and His Wife”, 1538, weighing coins at a table; the Alte Pinakothek, which owns it, calls him a tax collector. Painting: Marinus van Reymerswaele. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
“A Moneychanger and His Wife”, 1538, weighing coins at a table; the Alte Pinakothek, which owns it, calls him a tax collector. Painting: Marinus van Reymerswaele. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Five thousand years of money

From barley rations counted on clay at Uruk to a newspaper headline buried in Bitcoin’s first block: how people have kept score of what they owe one another. Lumps of weighed silver became stamped coins in Lydia, merchants’ receipts in Sichuan became the world’s first state paper money, and banks in Amsterdam, Stockholm and London learned to create money of their own. For two centuries most of the world tied its money to gold; since 1971 none of it is.

How to read it

  • Monetary regimes are bands: the Roman denarius sliding into base metal, China’s four centuries of paper, Britain on gold, the gold standard, Bretton Woods and the floating era we still live in. They overlap where two systems really did.

  • The map runs from Sardis, Chang’an and Chengdu through Damascus, Delhi, the Maldives, Potosí and Florence to Amsterdam, Stockholm, London, a hotel in New Hampshire and Nairobi.

  • Filter by coins, paper money, banking, gold, inflation, trade or technology to follow one thread across the millennia.

Three calendars

Dates before 1582, and English and Swedish dates until those countries switched, are in the Julian calendar, as the sources give them. Abd al-Malik’s gold dinar is dated as the coin dates itself, in the year 77 of the Hijri calendar, which the timeline places in 696–697 CE. Everything later is Gregorian.

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks — the text in Bitcoin’s genesis block

Items

  1. Money by weight in Mesopotamia

    2,400 years

  2. Barley accounts at Uruk

    Uruk (Warka)

  3. The Laws of Hammurabi price loans

    Babylon

  4. Fu Hao’s cowries

    Yinxu, the Shang capital near Anyang

  5. Spade and knife money

    ≈ 379 years

  6. The first coins, in Lydia

    Sardis, the Lydian capital

  7. Croesus strikes pure gold and silver

    Sardis, the Lydian capital

  8. Qin makes the ban liang the empire’s coin

    Xianyang, the Qin capital

  9. Rome strikes the denarius

    Temple of Juno Moneta, Capitoline Hill, Rome

  10. The silver drains from Roman coins

    210 years

  11. Caracalla’s double denarius

  12. Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices

  13. Constantine’s solidus

    Trier

  14. The Kaiyuan tongbao

    Chang’an (Xi’an)

  15. Abd al-Malik’s gold dinar

    Damascus, the Umayyad capital

  16. “Flying money”

    Chang’an (Xi’an)

  17. Chengdu merchants issue the jiaozi

    Chengdu

  18. China’s age of paper money

    426 years

  19. The Song state takes over the jiaozi

    Chengdu

  20. Cowrie money in West Africa

    ≈ 599 years · Cowrie zone of West Africa, from Senegambia to the Niger

  21. Florence mints the florin

    Florence

  22. Kublai Khan’s zhongtong notes

  23. Marco Polo sees the Khan’s paper money

    Khanbaliq (Dadu), now Beijing

  24. Muhammad bin Tughluq’s token coins

    Delhi

  25. Ibn Battuta and the Maldive cowries

    Malé, Maldives

  26. The Ming’s great paper note

    Nanjing, the first Ming capital

  27. The Medici Bank

    Florence

  28. Silver at Potosí

    Cerro Rico, Potosí

  29. The Manila galleons

    ≈ 249 years · Acapulco to Manila by way of Guam

  30. The Bank of Amsterdam opens

    Old Town Hall, Dam, Amsterdam

  31. Stockholms Banco prints Europe’s first banknotes

    Gamla stan, Stockholm

  32. Massachusetts pays its soldiers in paper

    Boston

  33. The Bank of England is founded

    Mercers’ Hall and Grocers’ Hall, London

  34. Newton sets the guinea at 21 shillings

    Royal Mint, Tower of London

  35. The Restriction

    ≈ 24 years · Bank of England, Threadneedle Street

  36. Britain on the gold standard

    ≈ 93 years · Bank of England, Threadneedle Street

  37. The international gold standard

    ≈ 43 years

  38. Germany adopts the gold mark

    Berlin

  39. “A cross of gold”

    Chicago Coliseum, Jackson Park

  40. War takes the sovereign out of pockets

    City of London

  41. German hyperinflation

    ≈ 1 year, 3 months · Berlin

  42. The Rentenmark

    Berlin

  43. Churchill puts Britain back on gold

    House of Commons, Westminster

  44. Britain leaves gold for good

    Bank of England, Threadneedle Street

  45. Roosevelt sets gold at 35 dollars

  46. The Bretton Woods conference

    21 days · Mount Washington Hotel, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire

  47. The Bretton Woods system

    ≈ 25 years, 7 months

  48. BankAmericard’s Fresno drop

    Fresno, California

  49. The first cash machine

    Barclays, Enfield Town

  50. The London gold pool collapses

    City of London

  51. Nixon closes the gold window

    Oval Office, White House

  52. Floating exchange rates

  53. The euro is born

    Eurotower, Frankfurt

  54. Euro notes and coins

  55. M-Pesa launches in Kenya

    Nairobi

  56. The Bitcoin white paper

  57. Bitcoin’s genesis block

  58. Two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins

    Jacksonville, Florida

  59. El Salvador makes bitcoin legal tender

    San Salvador