Money

Money in History

Money has taken a number of different forms throughout history, and these forms have been matched to particular categories of practice. For example, in Monomotapa at the Gulf of Guinea, slave traders used the local currency (cotton cloth) to pay for slaves and valued the price of a slave as a large piece of cloth called “a piece of India,” denoting its size. In time, the expression became synonymous with a male slave between the age of fifteen and forty (Braudel 1981, 442). In other words, the language of money constituted the language of everyday life. Other premodern currencies included copper bracelets (manillas), seashells (zimbos and cowries), coral, dried fish, furs, and nails, to name but a few.

In the West, money itself reflected the social differentiations of class and status in society. Writing about money in the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, historian Fernand Braudel demonstrated how different categories of people were matched to different categories of money:

This use of money as a means of communicating social identity was not new. In a study of how money was used in Roman society between 200 BCE and CE 200, Michael Crawford recalls how a person's relationship with money affected his dignity and reputation. As a result, Tiberius intervened in the dispute between the moneylenders and members of the upper classes to preserve their social status and to maintain the social order. Crawford writes: