A history of currencies

Long before coins, money was whatever a community agreed to accept. Each experiment scored differently on the properties of money — and each eventually failed on one of them.

Shells (cowrie)

Used across Africa, Asia and the Pacific for millennia — portable, durable, hard to fake by hand. Their downfall was scarcity: once European ships could deliver cowries by the ton, they flooded in and the money collapsed.

Cattle

Among the oldest stores of wealth — the Latin “pecunia” (money) comes from “pecus” (cattle). Great value, but you can’t make change from a cow, it can sicken and die, and you can’t carry it in a pouch.

Salt

So valuable that Roman soldiers may have been paid in it — the root of the word “salary”. Divisible and widely wanted, but heavy, and it dissolves. Once anyone could mine or evaporate it cheaply, its scarcity was gone.

Tobacco

Colonial Virginia literally ran on tobacco, with warehouse receipts circulating as notes. But growers could always plant more, so the money supply inflated with every good harvest — a store of value that farmers could print.

Wampum (beads)

Shell beads used by Native American nations and colonists alike. Labour-intensive to make by hand — until industrial drills let colonists mass-produce them and debase the money into worthlessness.

Rai stones (Yap)

Giant limestone wheels, some too heavy to move — so islanders just remembered who owned which stone, an early public ledger. Their value fell when Western ships with iron tools made new stones easy to quarry.

The pattern

Notice what kills every one of these: someone finds a way to make more of it cheaply. Shells by the boatload, beads by the drill, tobacco by the field. The moment a money can be produced faster than the economy grows, its holders are quietly robbed by inflation.

“The good money is the one that is hardest to produce — the one whose supply the powerful can least easily expand.”

So the search narrowed to a good that no one could easily make more of, that didn’t rot, and that a person could carry. As we saw in the periodic table, the universe offers very few candidates — and one kept winning. Next: why the world converged on gold.

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