Libros: Money in the Pre-Industrial World: Bullion, Debasements and Coin

John H. Munro ha editado  Money in the Pre-Industrial World: Bullion,  Debasements and Coin Substitutes. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. xi + 225  pp., ISBN: 978-1-84893-230-2.

La reseña de Martin Allen (Fitzwilliam Museum, University of 
Cambridge) para EH.Net nos refiere: "/Money in the Pre-Industrial World/ is the brainchild of John H. Munro,  Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Toronto, who for many  years has been one of the leading figures in the field of monetary history.  In this volume Munro has brought together an important collection of essays  on his subject, which is based upon papers given at the XVth World Economic  History Congress at the University of Utrecht in 2009. Munro himself contributes a major paper on coinage debasements in England and  the Low Countries and a typically magisterial introduction summing up the  themes of the book’s ten chapters, which largely focus upon the period up  to 1800. He identifies three basic themes: international supplies of bullion,  precious-metal coinages and their debasements, and substitutes for  precious-metal money.


Bullion and precious-metal coins had a crucial role in  the development of international trade between Europe and Asia, which would  not have been possible without massive movements of gold and silver  eastwards. Silver coinage was the predominant means of exchange in the  domestic economies of medieval Europe, but it was vulnerable to debasements, which reduced its weights or the fineness of its metal, or both. Munro identifies two kinds of debasement: aggressive and defensive. Aggressive debasements altered the coinage to increase mint profits for fiscal purposes,  particularly in wartime, and defensive debasements were primarily intended to  protect the coinage by making the prices offered by the mints for bullion  more competitive. Debasements might provide low-value coins useful as small  change, but Munro rejects the suggestion that this was their usual intention.





Munro argues that the inflationary effects of debasements were usually less  than any change in the bullion content of the coinage, and this point is  powerfully supported by Peter Spufford’s analysis of debasements in England  in the 1540s and the Netherlands in the 1480s, in Chapter 4. Spufford argues  that debasements could have beneficial effects in stimulating export trade  and reducing consumption of imported goods. The maintenance of a strong,  undebased currency could become increasingly difficult when large quantities  of debased currencies were being imported from elsewhere, as José Antonio  Mateos Royo demonstrates in his discussion (in Chapter 7) of the  failure of  successive royal administrations and parliaments in seventeenth-century  Aragon to agree on a policy of debasement. In 1609 the Dutch Republic  successfully dealt with the import of foreign coinage by establishing the  Amsterdam Wisselbank, where all foreign merchants were obliged to deposit  their money in bank accounts as fixed-value guilders. Hermann van der Wee’s  account of the Wisselbank in Chapter 5 shows that this ‘bank money’  quickly achieved a major role in trade, in the Netherlands and  internationally. The Wisselbank did not issue banknotes or manage a public  debt, unlike the Bank of England in late seventeenth-century England, but the  English approach to the maintenance of a sound currency had its  disadvantages, as Nicholas Mayhew demonstrates in Chapter 6. Mayhew’s  comparison of the quantities of silver struck by the London mint, hallmarked  as plate, and exported by the East India Company between 1600 and 1800  documents the decline in the mint’s output caused by a failure to even  slightly debase the coinage to offer a competitive price for silver.

Several essays in the volume show how coinages in precious metals could  coexist with debased currencies or money substitutes. Kenneth W. Harl  explores debasement in the Roman Empire in Chapter 2, showing that between 274 and 371 AD it had a fully functioning fiduciary currency of silver-coated  coins of minimal silver content alongside its coinage of gold and silver,  drawing instructive parallels between this system and twentieth-century  economies. In Chapter 10, John S. Deyell elucidates the diversity of currency  systems in India between c. 1200 and the 1570s, which included a combination  of silver coins and cowrie shells in the Bengal Sultanate. In Mexico, denuded  of its mined silver by Spanish exports, cacao beans kept their pre-Columbian  function as small change, as Arturo Giraldez shows in Chapter 9. In Chapter  8, Renate Pieper discusses the relationship between supplies of  Spanish-American silver and prices in Mexico, Castile and Amsterdam. The  Spanish-American silver peso became a truly international currency, and the  same can be said of the Venetian gold ducat and its derivatives, as Alan  Stahl shows in Chapter 3.

This book can be thoroughly recommended to anybody interested in the subject.  Unlike many collections of essays based upon conference proceedings it is more than the sum of its parts, with clearly defined coherent themes. Above all, it is a powerful defense of the monetary historians’ belief that money is a major factor in world history. In today’s economic situation who can  doubt it?"

Martin Allen es Senior Assistant Keeper en Department of Coins and  Medals at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Ha publicado /Mints and Money in Medieval England/ (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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