No one would deny that money is a means of exchange. However, historically, exchanges between people have had different characteristics, and the devices used to mediate those exchanges have reflected those characteristics. All exchanges have two, binary characteristics. The first characteristic is the degree of familiarity of the participants: an exchange can either occur anonymously or within a named relationship. The second characteristic of an exchange is its distance: a trade can be made either proximately or distantly. By distance we do not refer simply to physical distance, but rather to the size of the value of the exchange and its frequency. All exchanges have these binary characteristics of familiarity and distance. There are, therefore, four different kinds of exchanges, which we can represent with four quadrants. People in societies have tried to make different devices to mediate all four kinds of exchanges.

In this paper I use rational choice and institutional theory to make economic sense of eyewitness accounts of trade and money from the 9th to the 12th centuries in Eurasia. The sources are accounts from Arabic travellers in the concerned regions, complemented by other written sources as well as archeological findings. As the trade concerns repeated, or even continuous, long distance trade I also use the theoretical framework of analytical narratives as well as Kuroda’s four quadrants of exchange, involving ‘distance’ and ‘familiarity’ in the analysis.

Siberia during the 18 - 19th centuries is known to have different means of exchange supporting various trade relations. Before the colonization of the territory in the middle of the 16th century, the “trade-communication” life of the tribes was characterized by in-kind exchanging of food, cattle and necessities depending on location and seasonality. The monetary relationships judging by the historical descriptions and legislative acts were not characteristic to these inhabitants. Money started to circulate with the arrival of the Russian troops, founding of fortresses-towns and the state institutions. This paper shows discreetly under what circumstances within 18 - 19th century money (small and large currency) was used as a means of exchange, and what other means were used in other cases and whether they could be systemized. The argument aims to clarify whether the Siberia during this period can be considered as not contradictory to the 4-quadrants proposition.

forthcoming

The local monetary crises that took place in France between 1894 and 1896 remain largely ignored. Small coins circulation and their withdrawal in late 19th century France took place within a complex multi-scale monetary context, from the international (Latin Monetary Union) to the local level. Thus, in some localities the circulation medium was sometimes widely different from the legal framework, especially in harbours and textile cities, which led to local monetary tensions and sudden outbursts of social unrest. These problems developed not only in consequence of the unsustainability of the small silver denominations and the restriction in the circulation of foreign (or forged) small coins, but also reflected a socially fragmented monetary circulation. These small crises, sometimes leading to violent riots, illustrate the ambiguous nature of money, whose socially separated denominations raised social justice issues and illustrated the limits to the nationalization of monetary systems.

forthcoming

I will review the use of money in Japan in a historical perspective. From the ancient through the pre-modern history, people chose a money to use from a wide variety of monies depending on the type of transactions. I will try to classify the use of various monies in terms of space (distance) and anonymity (familiarity of participants) of transactions when it was used, following Kuroda's definitions. I will look at the use of coins, commodities such as rice and clothes, strips of paper such as notes and bills of exchange, and bookkeeping instruments in each period. Then, I will discuss implications of the unification of money in the modern period.

The collapse, revival, and then final demise of the gold standard during the interwar period has received considerable attention in financial histories of Europe and North America. Existing research has examined not only the decisions which led to monetary instability in this period, but also how monetary policies affected core economies. However, the imperial dimension of these crises have been largely neglected. Colonial expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had extended gold standard currencies to much of Asia and Africa, where they joined existing monetary systems. How did instabilities in the international gold standard impact monetary systems in the colonies? This paper compares three cases in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1920s and 1930s in which international shifts affected monetary arrangements in African countries, and examines how Africans and those who governed them responded to global change.

This paper traces the distinct forms of circulation displayed by different denominations in early colonial British East Africa (BEA) and argues that their use was shaped by gender, social class and by the type of transaction. It reconstructs the processes of colonial monetization from 1905 - when the Indian rupee and its fractional coins, the East African cents, became the official currency of BEA - to the 1920s, and it explores the ways in which monetary practises, including particular ways of reckoning, shaped the use of colonial money. This paper suggests that the ways in which Africans used colonial currencies influenced their circulation to such an extent as to transform what was perceived by the British authorities as a “general- purpose currency” into a number of ‘disconnected’ denominations which served special-purpose functions.

Most economies nowadays operate on the basis of one currency per country. Argentina was a notable and rather recent exception with several currencies circulating in rather large currency circuits at the national, provincial, municipal and community levels. This paper explores in what ways households and businesses combined several currencies for accountancy, exchange, payments and savings. From a Polanyian perspective, it conceptualised the notion of currency circuits as institutionalised relations of a currency with specific spaces, products and categories of agents. The research discloses that households and small businesses can deal with monetary plurality by organising what currencies they use for what purpose, without converting one currency into another. What is more important, monetary plurality enabled production and the use of skills that were idle, hence confirming Kuroda’s hypothesis that several currencies could do more than any one currency by itself.

Chinese peasants strategically chose one-time transaction which was independent from particular buyer. One-time transaction was popular in the choice by not only peasants in local exchanges but also by petit traders who connected villages and towns. Consequently, price movements in local currencies such as copper coins at local market places did not follow the changes in inter-regional trades which were made in silver. Keeping the independence of local trades, local merchants established a system for settlements through account books and issued native notes to respond to chronical shortage of currency. The contrast with Japanese peasants who tended to make subsequent transaction which was dependent on usual broker shows a case of discrepancy between a society dependent on local/anonymous exchange and another on local/named exchange.