在美元诞生之前：人类历史上充当货币的12种奇特物品与信用演进

Before the U.S. dollar, people paid with everything from cacao beans to playing cards. Here are twelve forms of money, from savings you could drink to official promises that left people out of pocket. Number one: cacao beans. In Aztec society, and among the Maya around the Spanish conquest, cacao beans could serve as money. They were also an ingredient for drinks. So your payment had a use beyond buying something else. You could drink it. A feature most banknotes wisely avoid. Imagine you're selling a pot. Someone offers you cacao beans. You might accept them because you want to make a drink. But you might also accept them because another seller will take those beans when you need food. You don't have to want the beans yourself. You have to expect that somebody else will. You're selling pottery. You're not committing to a lifelong relationship with cacao. That's the useful part: the pot leaves your hands, and the beans let you make your next purchase. But using your money as an ingredient creates an awkward choice. Once you've turned those beans into a drink, you can't spend them. You have just drunk part of your savings. At least you know where the money went. There was another problem: counterfeit beans. A seller could give up a real pot, then discover they'd been paid with fake beans. The pot was real. The payment was more of a creative interpretation. So accepting beans also meant checking what you'd been given. Keep that inspection problem in mind. It will follow us all the way to silver. First, we're going further back, to a payment that could buy land and then feed the seller. Number two: barley. In ancient Mesopotamia, grain could buy more than dinner. A clay tablet from around twenty-four hundred to twenty-two hundred B.C. records land purchases paid for with barley. Someone bought land with something you could also make into porridge. Property finance used to have considerably more fibre. The seller receives food, or something they can pass on. Measuring the barley lets both sides agree how much payment has changed hands. A heap described as quite a lot is a poor basis for a property contract. But a useful staple brings physical obligations. You have to move it, store it and protect it. Imagine being paid several sacks and then discovering that part of your balance has become lunch for mice. Your account has withdrawals. You did not authorise them. With cacao, you could drink your savings. With barley, you can eat them. So can your uninvited account managers. The same handful cannot pay for dinner and become dinner: once it's consumed, that part of the payment is gone. That tablet records a particular land purchase. It doesn't mean every customer dragged a grain cart into every shop. But the practical difficulty is easy to see: a payment can be valuable and thoroughly inconvenient to own.

Salt will put that inconvenience on the road. Number three: salt bars. An account from a Portuguese mission to Ethiopia in fifteen twenty described salt being used as money. Historian Richard Pankhurst also recorded how its value varied with distance from the source and the difficulty of keeping it intact. Picture a trader carrying salt from a place where it's available to somewhere it's harder to obtain. The salt hasn't become a different substance. Getting it there has taken work, and buyers at the destination may give more for it. Your money has a better exchange rate after a journey. Unfortunately, you have to take it on the journey. Our barley owner needed storage. Our salt carrier needs a strong back. A damaged bar may also be a less attractive payment than an intact one. You can lose money without spending it. Simply being in charge of it will do. A higher destination value doesn't mean the whole difference is profit. In this imagined journey, the carrier still needs food, time and protection for the load. What matters is what's left after those costs. A profitable-looking balance can develop very expensive travel habits. Remember that load. When we reach tobacco, I'll show you how a payment can travel while the crop stays put. For now, two salt bars needn't have the same value, just as two pieces of cloth needn't represent the same amount of work. Number four: raffia cloth. In the early modern Loango economy, on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa, cloth could store wealth and serve as currency. This wasn't just a convenient way to pay someone who happened to be cold. Salt made us check an object's condition. Cloth adds the work that went into making it. Someone prepares the fibres and weaves them. Better workmanship can make one piece more valuable than another. Cloth had recognised grades, and rulers controlled master weavers producing luxury textiles. So imagine two sellers offering you pieces of similar size. One is carefully made. The other looks as though the weaver left halfway through a difficult conversation. Counting two pieces doesn't tell you that you have two equal payments. You also need to know their quality and what other people will accept. A recognised grade gives the next buyer a starting point. They don't have to discover the entire textile industry during every purchase. They still need to check that this piece deserves that grade. A standard makes comparison easier; it doesn't make the person selling you cloth incapable of optimism. In a few minutes, I'll show you a purchase priced in beaver skins where no beaver skin changes hands. That sounds like I've forgotten the payment. I haven't. We'll come back to it.

The next object comes ready-made. The production department is a mollusc. Number five: cowrie shells. In ancient China, cowries appear in Shang and Zhou inscriptions about rewards and treasuries. The British Museum describes their monetary use. These small shells mattered well before the dollar, without having to provide dinner or keep anyone warm. At last, a balance you are less tempted to consume. A shell can be attractive, portable and recognisable. But finding one isn't the same thing as finding a universally accepted banknote. The person receiving it needs a reason to value it or expect somebody else to take it. Remember our pot seller accepting cacao because another seller would take the beans? Shells can connect people in the same way. Imagine arriving with a bag of shells where sellers accept them. You have purchasing power. Carry that same bag into a market that doesn't accept them, and you have a collection. The bag has not changed. Your financial confidence has. In our imaginary market, a seller might accept shells without personally wanting more shells. They want the food those shells can buy tomorrow. Today's payment works partly because of tomorrow's expected customer. Money can be desirable because you expect to get rid of it. An unusual recommendation for a possession. Shell beads in North America raise another question: even when the material looks similar, is the object doing the same job? Number six: wampum beads. In northeastern North America, Indigenous peoples made and traded shell beads, and European colonists used wampum as currency in parts of seventeenth-century New England. With cowries, we asked who would accept the shells. With wampum, we also need to ask what a particular object is for. Wampum belts could preserve history and serve ceremonial and diplomatic purposes. Treating a belt as a pile of loose change would be rather like judging a signed treaty by how much scrap paper it contains. For the payment side, imagine a seller accepting exchange beads and later passing them to another trader. The beads connect the two transactions because both recipients recognise them as acceptable value. The seller can receive beads from one customer and use them to obtain food from somebody else. That doesn't turn every bead arrangement into cash, any more than printing a portrait turns every photograph into a banknote. Payment, record and ceremony are different roles. The material alone doesn't tell you which role you're looking at. The beads make us separate the object from its job. That distinction is about to become useful at a fur-trading counter.

Number seven: beaver pelts. The Hudson's Bay Company priced trade goods in made beavers: a standard based on a prime winter beaver skin. Remember the cloth grades? Here, a specified quality of pelt gave traders a common way to compare goods. The beaver was not consulted about the branding. A price stated in made beavers didn't mean every purchase required that exact number of prime skins to move across the counter. Other furs could be valued against the standard, and trading-post systems could use tallies or tokens to represent credit for supplies. Imagine bringing in a bundle of other furs. The trader assesses them, states their value in made beavers, and you use that value to obtain goods. Remember the purchase I promised, priced in beaver skins without handing over a beaver skin? This is what I meant. The other furs supply the payment; made beavers supply the measuring language. If a pot and a blanket are priced in that same language, you can compare what each costs. You still have to agree on the value of your furs. The unit organises the argument. It does not abolish it. That measuring language is called a unit of account. Naming the price and making the payment are different jobs. For the next payment, the trader brings a more literal measuring device: scales. Number eight: weighed silver. In Viking-age trade, payments could use silver measured by weight: coins, pieces of ingots, or fragments cut from objects such as arm rings. Coins existed alongside these other forms. The metal could matter more than an intact coin's face value. Imagine a buyer placing silver on one side of a balance and weights on the other. If the silver comes up short, the buyer adds a piece. If a larger piece is too much, cutting it can help make the payment. Your change may arrive with tool marks. It is still change. Now imagine two pieces of equal weight. One contains more silver; the other has more other metal mixed in. The scales balance. Would you accept them as equal payment? If you're thinking of the counterfeit cacao, you've spotted the problem. A very accurate scale can give you a very accurate weight for something you didn't want to buy. So we check the material as well as the weight. But in a few minutes, we'll meet money that's completely genuine and still leaves its owner short. That sounds unfair. I'll show you how it happened.

First, coins in shapes that would make a modern vending machine quietly resign. Number nine: bronze spades and knives. Ancient Chinese money included bronze coins shaped like spades and knives. Examples survive from the Warring States period, centuries before the common era. These were money objects with tool-like forms. The point is not that everyone paid for lunch with a functioning garden spade. We tend to picture a coin as a round disc. If you're already asking whether the next seller will accept it, you've found the more useful question. Remember the cowries? The same bag could buy things in one market and become a collection in another. Recognition and acceptance mattered more than our idea of what money ought to look like. Imagine showing a modern coin to someone who has never used that currency. A neat circle does not explain its purchasing power. It simply gives the mystery a smooth edge. A spade-shaped coin can be perfectly recognisable within its own system, however surprising it looks in ours. So we've had money shaped like food, clothing and tools. The next case brings back the heavy crop problem. This time, we'll see a way for the payment to leave the crop behind. Number ten: tobacco. In colonial Chesapeake economy, tobacco served as currency. Receiving a valuable crop creates two familiar questions. How much is there, and how good is it? A large quantity of poor tobacco isn't improved by writing payment on the side. Virginia's inspection system of seventeen thirty gave warehouses a central role. Inspectors could reject poor tobacco, and instruments issued through the warehouses circulated as currency. Back with salt, I promised a payment could travel while the crop stayed put. Here's how. Imagine acceptable tobacco stored in a warehouse, with a document representing value held there. Think of a cloakroom ticket: you carry the ticket; your coat stays put. Here, someone else may also accept the claim as payment. The document changes hands; the tobacco stays in storage. Your back has finally been consulted. But if you're now wondering whether the warehouse actually has the tobacco, you've found the next problem. The holder relies on the stored goods, the inspection and rules that let them obtain the value promised. The warehouse still has to do its job while you carry the convenient bit of paper. Beautiful handwriting cannot repair missing tobacco. It can only describe the disappointment elegantly. A light document can carry a substantial obligation. Our next record carries one too. It is considerably less forgiving of a paper jam.

Number eleven: wooden tallies. In England, notched tally sticks recorded obligations. A surviving example at the Bank of England records a government loan from sixteen ninety-four. The notches marked value, and the stick was split so the two parts could later be matched. Imagine each side keeping one half. If somebody alters the record, the halves can expose the mismatch when brought together. It's an authentication system made out of a stick. Refreshingly, it does not ask you to remember a password. Some tallies also helped transfer the value of a debt. This wasn't ordinary wooden cash anybody could wave at a shopkeeper. Formal transfers could involve an accompanying endorsed order and registration. A sixteen ninety-three archival record describes an order to transfer a tally and its associated payment order. The halves can match perfectly while the borrower has nothing to pay you with. You've checked the record. You still haven't been paid. The cacao seller needed to check the beans; here, checking the object leaves another question open. Will the borrower honour the obligation? A wonderfully secure record can still record money you haven't received. The value lay in the obligation and the system recognising it. Buying a branch would not make you a government creditor, although you would own a branch. Now put an official promise on a playing card. We've reached the genuine money I warned you about. Number twelve: playing cards. In New France in sixteen eighty-five, a shortage of coins led officials to issue signed playing cards as emergency money. Ordinary cards carried officially stated values and promises of later payment. Finally, a way to lose money at cards without even playing. The essential part wasn't the king, queen or number printed on the front. It was the official inscription and the promise behind it. An unsigned card from your own pack did not become money because you looked confident while handing it over. As with the tally, the material alone isn't enough. One card is just a card. Another carries an authorised value that people expect to be honoured. Exchanging that claim for the payment promised by its issuer is called redemption. Until that happens, passing the card to someone else passes along that expectation. The king on the card is not personally staffing the repayment desk. The first period of card money eventually ended with losses on redemption. Remember when I said genuine money could still leave its owner short? This is what I meant. The cards could be official, yet their holders received less than they'd expected when the promise was settled. Our cacao seller worried about fake beans. Here, the object could pass the check. The promise was where the trouble lived. We started with a pot seller deciding whether to accept beans. Show us another strange piece of money now, and we've got better questions than, Why that shape? Who'll accept it? How do I check what I've been given? Can I carry it home? And if it's a claim, who has to honour it? These weren't twelve steps that every society climbed in order. Different arrangements existed alongside one another, and the U.S. dollar's adoption in seventeen eighty-five didn't make them all disappear. The objects changed the practical problems. Barley needed protection from mice. Salt needed transport. A warehouse claim could spare your back while giving you an institution to trust. A signature could make a card money without making its promise certain. A modern payment hides much of that machinery. These objects make it harder to overlook. They also make one piece of financial housekeeping unusually literal: if your money is cacao, do check your balance before making a drink.