A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Empire

Federico Neiburg, Nigel Dodd

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350253537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

The nineteenth century was a time of intense monetization of social life: increasingly money became the only means of access to goods and services, especially in the new metropolises; new technologies and infrastructures emerged for saving and circulating money and for standardizing coinage; and paper currencies were printed, founded purely on trust without any intrinsic metallic value. But the monetary landscape was ambivalent so that the forces unifying monetary practice (imperial and national currencies, global monetary standards such as the gold standard) coexisted with the proliferation of local currencies. Money became a central issue in politics, the arts, and sciences - and the modern discipline of economics was born, with its claim to a monopoly on knowing and governing money. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Empire presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.

Chapter One

Money and Its Technologies

Inventing the Future through Money—Images of Monetization in Nineteenth-Century American Patents

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra

Weber’s Protestants teach us something we sort of already know: money conjures the imagination of the future and the moral fallibilities of the present (Weber 2002). A coin saved today is a compulsion paused—but it is, too, a thoughtful contribution to a greater project, whether a special purchase by a thrifty child at FAO Schwartz on a rainy weekend or a one-way ticket to spiritual salvation. Money is a promise, an expectation, a possibility, a deferred potential present. Money is, in this very specific sense, a future in your pocket.

In this chapter, I want to think of the temporal orientation of money not through money itself but through the devices and paraphernalia associated to its keeping, use, and making. That money is thoroughly technological is obviously clear to the contemporary reader. Salaries are often paid in electrons and magnetization, read and modified through circuits and processors, represented on plastic, paper, and metal. Money is technology, not only in its substance but also in its essence, enframing our modern experiences through distinct (though by no means single) forms of valuation (Zelizer 1994).

Here, though, I am not so much concerned with “money-as-a-technology” (a topic that has an extensive literature (see Maurer 2015, Coeckelbergh 2015)), as with the technologies that money fostered in the nineteenth century. If a technology, money requires supports—infrastructures of monetization that stabilize its use and circulation. As with the digital payment systems and global transaction networks that animate electronic money in the early twenty-first century (Bátiz-Lazo et al 2014, Stearns 2007), nineteenth-century money existed in relation to a growing network of objects, designs, and things that collectively distilled what monies meant and what was expected from them for the future. These machines were vivid expressions of the understandings, anxieties and promises associated with money and its place in societies where capitalism and monetization were rapidly expanding across everyday life. And as such, they are the objects of this brief excursion.

In considering how technologies referenced the meanings of money, I will furthermore focus on imagined rather than actual things. With this, I want to doubly stress the promissory character of money, firstly through how it signals a particular future-orientation, but secondly in how it elicits designs about the future, promises of how promises will be produced and handled. So while this is a chapter on the technologies of money, it is rather more specific. Instead of actually-existing things, I look into the checkered history of patents about money in order to see how this double promise—one of technology, one of money—speaks of the meanings of monies, societies, and their conjoined paths.

Patents and Their (un)Realized Futures

As central features of the modern intellectual property regime, patents represent both the bounties of innovation and the countless failures of invention. Originally introduced in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance as monopolies granted by monarchs to inventors over the fruits of their invention, patents became central instruments for the legal protection of property in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When the control over intellectual products became important in the nascent capitalist economies of modern Europe, patents rose into undisputed terrains for defining and contesting ownership over designs that could, in theory, be profitably exploited by entrepreneurial minds.

This is not to say that all patents materialize into innovations. Cliometricians may use the frequency of patenting as a measure of innovation (Streb 2016), of the creative powers of industry and entrepreneurialism. Yet much evidence exists that patents more often than not fail to reach the point of application (in the field of biotechnology, for example, the consulting firm Ernst & Young estimates that fewer than ten percent of the patents reach the market). In some cases, patents merely serve the purpose of claiming a potentially useful innovation to deter possible competitors (Heller and Eisenberg 1998); in most other cases, they are clearly fancies of the imagination (a nineteenth-century patent for spectacles for chickens, meant to protect them from aggressive pecking from other chickens, stands as a notable example).

Independently of whether patents result or not in a material contribution to the world, they clearly index the dreams and preoccupations of their makers. For example, in the United States, where the patent system is almost as old as the nation itself, patentability is couched in terms of practical utility: in addition to not being merely hypothetical, a patent must solve a problem of some sort, introducing a “useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof” (United States Patent Office 2017) into possible circulation. Establishing utility is predicated on creating a clear distinction between problems and non-problems, things that preoccupy the inventor with things that do not. Effectively, in order to be patentable, a design must demonstrate some form of improvement, a rationale, a logic, a contribution; it requires shifting the state-of-art through a proposed solution.

While individualizing as most forms of property are, patents are necessarily tied to a larger infrastructure of knowledge-making. In establishing “novelty” with respect to a “state-of-art,” for example, patents create linkages and comparisons, provenances of authors, claims, and previous inventions that generate the boundaries of patentability. That patents are associated with individuals rather than the larger contexts from which they derive is, in many ways, an artifact of legal work. As anthropologist Marilyn Strathern alerts, patents truncate the social networks where problems are constituted, claims contested, and knowledge developed (Strathern 2001). This form of intellectual property “points simultaneously to an item or technique made available to knowledge, authorizing its use and circulation, and to the knowledge, on which claims are made, which has made it into an item or technique” (Strathern 2001: 20). As such, patent records are not simply disentangled indicators of punctuated innovation trajectories but rather telescopes into possibly existing futures shared by collectives through their knowledges past and present. This is how I interpret patents in this chapter: not as signaling moments of invention by individuals, but rather as nodes that condense how the possibly existing futures of money were imagined across societies.

For the purpose of this chapter, I constrain my analysis to American patents from c. 1860 to 1915. The rationale for this is threefold. The first motive is historical. Patents in the United States were arguably closer to the construction of a national entrepreneurial project than their equivalents elsewhere. The modern patent system might have originated in Europe (as in England, where Henry VI notionally issued the first patent in 1449, although the practice was formalized in the Statue of Monopolies of 1624), but it was generally costly (patent fees for England in 1860 were approximately four times the annual per capita income). In England, the hierarchies of class drove the logic of invention. This was certainly not obvious in the United States, where the protection of intellectual property was enshrined in the Constitution and the powers it conferred on Congress to “promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” If anything, the American patent system was designed around slightly less steep entry standards than its European equivalents: whereas in 1860 filing fees in Europe averaged about 400 US dollars per patent, the costs in the United States were significantly lower at 30 dollars. The patent system in America was, as Zorina Khan (2005) writes, carefully calibrated to promote social and economic welfare, and entangled with the imagery of invention, merit and democracy of the young nation.

A second reason is monetary. Much of the early monetary history of the United States was marked by the political debacle of currency in relation to bimetallism: from the Colonial and Continental Currencies of the eighteenth century to the bills issued by free state banks in the 1830s, the forms of general-purpose monies available to the American public were multiple and underpinned by their convertibility into gold or silver. Triggered by the constraints and pressures of the Civil War, however, the United States government issued a new monetary standard in 1861, initially by transforming $50,000,000 of debt into Treasury notes, convertible on demand, and that became legal tender and underpinned the notes of national chartered banks. These so-called “greenbacks” signaled an important transformation in the politics of money and currency: the consolidation, perhaps, of a particular and slightly more contemporarily capitalist way of thinking about the economy in relation to state and society. Unlike bullionists, greenbackers located value not in the convertibility of a note into gold but, rather, in “exchangeability as a basis for confidence” (Carruthers and Babb 1996). The value of currency emanated from the institutional status of government; money was “a creature of law,” rather than an intrinsic value derived from scarcity and nature. For my analysis, this matters critically since the period that I cover is defined by the issuance of the United States Note and the simultaneous use of the gold coin. Bullionist concerns about the status of money did not disappear with the adoption of the greenback—the metaphors animating bitcoin today serve as striking indicators of the continuity of these concerns. In the imaginations of inventors from the period we should thus expect to find both a concern for institutions as well as references to the intrinsic value of the rare. Monetarist history also informs the endpoint of this period: 1915 marks the creation of the Federal Reserve System that has defined the makeup of currency ever since.

A third consideration is eminently practical. Patents existed in the United States since 1791 but are mostly unavailable from before 1836, when a fire destroyed the records of the United States Patent Office. Like most historical records, patents are tied to their physical qualities as legal instrumentalia, and in the case of the United States, are curtailed by the eventfulness of history itself. That the corpus informing this paper was segmented in this way should not affect the quality of the results, though: the loss of early American patents (though important in historical terms) does not overlap with the critical inflection points of the intertwined institutional history of money and patents in the United States.

The patents that I examine in the following pages are bounded by these three constraints. Nevertheless, they address how people at the time, caught between the claims of bullionists and greenbackers, imagined how money ought to be measured, handled, stored and produced. These patents were part of the infrastructures of money that nineteenth-century inventors dreamt up in their minds and perhaps built in their shops—and that, as truncated elements in a larger network, spoke of the anxieties, desires, hopes and afflictions that American societies had about the nature and future of money itself. Patents and money were linked by dreams, and by examining the former we can understand the world that societies built around the latter.

The Dimensions of Money in Nineteenth-century American Patents

What do patents say of money? Throughout the corpus, money emerges as a clear rationale for innovation. Whether a hog-killing bed that sought to reduce the “great deal of money” lost with previous methods of slaughter (US712579A; Nicholson and Blanchard 1902), or the method for forming beaches that reduced the “vast sums of money [. . .] expended in dredging along coast-lines” (US715557A; Cushing 1902), pecuniary concerns are notable argumentative elements in establishing the novelty of inventions. I am not so much interested in these but in identifying the broad themes that structured the content of shared imaginaries about money. The first is necessarily about currency itself, that is, about the stability of money as an object of exchange.

Dreams of Ontology

Money is decidedly an abstraction (Ingham 2004), yet money-stuff grounds its everyday experience. The obduracy of money matters tremendously, even in the space of digital electronic payments systems. Think of credit cards. A recent trend among American banking institutions has been the production of premium credit cards that are tactilely distinguishable from their competition. In 2016, for example, the American bank JP Morgan Chase & Co. issued a new, premium, high-fee credit card. Unlike other cards offered by the bank’s its competitors and that used plastic as the substrate for the chips and magnetic tapes, Chase opted for an undisclosed alloy. The “card’s metal composition,” wrote a popular internet resource, is “clearly part of the appeal. Only a handful of other credit cards are metal, including the American Express Centurion Card, commonly known as the AmEx ‘black card,’ which is typically available only to millionaires, billionaires and celebrities.” Technically identical to the average plastic (digital bytes do not discriminate their substrate), Chase’s premium card was materially unique.

Of course, other forms of currency are not free from the constraints of the physical. Exchanged on average about 110 times per year (or about every three days), a one-dollar bill is prone to the forces and frictions of the wallet, purse, cash register, bundle, and forgotten drawer (Leibbrandt 2009). The stuff of money matters with such a hectic existence. A telling report from the United State’s National Research Council on the future of banknotes observes the importance of substrate, form, color and tactile qualities (National Research Council 1993). This was not merely a matter of printing and design but, as the council noted, of harnessing the most advanced technologies available to the Treasury: “microelectronics, nanotechnology, molecular electronics, materials, photonics, and magnetics should not only be followed but also encouraged by supporting technical work that is focused on deriving very sophisticated but inexpensive, reliable, accurate, inconspicuous devices...