A Global History of Money

Akinobu Kuroda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367859237
• eBook ISBN: 9781000054675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

Looking from the 11th century to the 20th century, Kuroda explores how money was used and how currencies evolved in transactions within local communities and in broader trade networks. The discussion covers Asia, Europe and Africa and highlights an impressive global interconnectedness in the pre-modern era as well as the modern age.

Drawing on a remarkable range of primary and secondary sources, Kuroda reveals that cash transactions were not confined to dealings between people occupying different roles in the division of labour (for example shopkeepers and farmers), rather that peasants were in fact great users of cash, even in transactions between themselves. The book presents a new categorization framework for aligning exchange transactions with money usage choices.

This fascinating monograph will be of great interest to advanced students and researchers of economic history, financial history, global history and monetary studies.

Part 1

Exchanges generate money locally

1 Peasants, marketplace and money

1 Peasants exchange with peasants anonymously

This volume pays attention most importantly to exchanges among peasants, who represented most humanity throughout history, since substantial exchanges among peasants generated money at the ground level. Before considering a variety of monetary usage in the bottom portion of societies, we should confirm how seriously ordinary people in the period before industrialization, even in rural localities, engaged in exchanges. This chapter demonstrates the importance of proximate exchanges made by ordinary peasants with other nearby peasants and how money was accordingly generated endogenously for these local exchanges. Unlike the image of anti-market peasants in the moral economy theory proposed by J. Scott, or the different image of corporative peasants in the rational peasant argument advanced by S. Popkin, typically, the case of Chinese peasant households showed market-dependent and individual strategies (Scott 1976; Popkin 1979; Kuroda 2018).

Mostly, indeed, peasants consume their products themselves. They, generally speaking, eat grains in the home rather than sell them. However, the tendency towards self-consumption by cultivators does not exclude the possibility that they need to purchase grains in addition to their own products. In reality, a peasant cultivating a grain sometimes purchases the grain from another peasant. For example, in the case of the Huangling village, Taiyuan County, Shanxi province, early 20th-century China, millet was the main grain cultivated by villagers. Among 71 peasant households who produced millet, 15 peasant households also purchased millet (KAKO 1944, appendix 12–15, 18–21). Not rarely, across the world, peasants purchased grains that they planted most commonly in their district. Even if we assume an extreme case that all peasants in a region cultivate a grain, some may have a good enough harvest to enjoy a surplus, while some may suffer shortages due to a bad harvest. As considered already in the introduction, potentially, exchanges between peasants can occur proximately without specialization of production.

Peasants consumed, sold and reserved their products in different ways according to society and period. Although we shall make a comparison between different societies later, here, we focus on the pattern that peasants had a certain degree of freedom to sell crops by their own will. Where and how did peasants sell the grain? Take a closer look at the case of the Huangling village mentioned earlier. There, local peasants brought grains to the marketplace which was held every other day in their village. Note that all villages did not always hold a marketplace. Usually, a marketplace in China attracted peasants from ten to 20 villages located within half-a-day commutation, as mentioned in the introduction. The Huangling village happened to have a marketplace in it. As far as the main crop was concerned, peasants usually sought to bring them to the marketplace and directly negotiate prices with buyers. The majority of modern investigations of peasant households in early 20th-century China show that peasants preferred selling products in a marketplace to selling to merchants in their own homes because they believed that they could realize appropriate prices in a marketplace while they might be cheated by the merchants at home.¹ Usually trades in the marketplace were settled by cash on the spot.

Meanwhile, the peasants in the Huangling village also produced vegetables for Taiyuan (the provincial capital, Yangqu County). Easy access to the provincial capital was a specific advantage for the peasants in this village. Villagers sold vegetables to merchants coming from the town to their homes and sometimes sold vegetables in the town by themselves. As we will discuss later, depending on situation, Chinese peasants strategically chose whether to bring their products to the marketplace or to sell directly to particular merchants. As Table 1.1 shows, importantly, either type of sale, grains or vegetables, had strong seasonality, though the bias towards grains was slightly bigger than that in vegetables.

Agriculture all over the world commonly experiences a considerable degree of seasonality. There is no agriculture without a slack season when little labour supply is needed. Meanwhile, in the busy season such as the cultivation and harvest, as much labour as is required must supply the need. How to organize both idle and busy times determines the characteristic of the peasantry differently society by society.

Table 1.1 Monthly sales of peasant products, Huangling village, Taiyuan, Shanxi, 1940 (yuan)

	Grains (millet)	Vegetables	Total	Sold in village	Sold for Taiyuan	Sold in yard
Jan	0	20	20	0	20	0
Feb	0	0	0	0	0	0
Mar	24	7.5	31.5	16.5	0	15
Apr	57	0	57	42	0	15
May	0	0	0	0	0	0
Jun	17	100.8	117.8	3.75	70.75	43.3
Jul	115	103.3	218.3	126.25	48.75	43.3
Aug	214.5	99.67	314.17	192	122.17	0
Sep	90.7	369.97	460.67	137.2	275.17	48.3
Oct	377.52	401	778.52	409.02	269.5	100
Nov	15	70	85	15	70	0
Dec	297.4	149.67	447.07	284.9	132.17	30
Total	1208.12	1321.91	2530.03	1226.62	1008.51	294.9

Source: KAKO 1944, appendix 16–17.

During busy seasons, when facing a labour shortage, Chinese peasant households typically hired day labourers. Those who wanted to be employed and who wanted to employ both gathered at a particular place, such as the end of a bridge in the early morning and negotiated conditions: the wage of the day and whether lunch would be provided. Liu Dapeng, a literatus in Chiqiao village, which also belonged to Taiyuan County, as the Huangling village did, wrote of a typical case in his diary in which hundreds of men gathered at a bridge to look for employers during the harvest season. Liu himself was not a large-scale lan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1 Exchanges generate money locally 17
• Part 2 A global history of monetary delocalization 65
• Appendix
• Index