Silver coin boom in medieval England due to melted down Byzantine treasures
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The ridges are to mitigate "clipping" which is the process of removing JUUUUUST enough metal from the coin as to not raise suspicion and people trade with them, but not enough to raise suspicion and get ... well killed by the Monarchy.
Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating. There is a guy at University of Arizona who has a course on Youtube that covers this subject, HIGHLY recommend.
The first chapter of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations also covers some of this. Specifically I remember the clipping topic, and then landlords weighing payments to protect themselves from clipping.
Also most of the time you can just dump a bag of coins on the table and visually quickly determine an odd ones, remove them, weight the remainder. Sorting != counting.
For clipping it means that when new coinage is minted that money is typically horded and the clipped coins are kept in circulation because they are deemed less valuable then their nominal value (the initial weight of the coin).
Why would someone use something more valuable in an exchange when the thing that's less valuable will suffice?
Gresham's Law would end up plaguing monarchy's and various governments for millenia and still to this day really.
We vastly under appreciate the very basic technology used to solve problems that existed for pretty much the entire world for thousands of years.
This created barriers to entry for valuation of money in the form of owning a scale that required higher precision in weight estimation. On top of that one can imagine that dispute that a merchants scale (this still probably happens even today) cheats was most likely common place.
It's fairly easy to imagine a cleverly placed point of additional friction can "tip the scales" in a merchants favor.
All that to say it would have been good to be in the "measurement" business way back in the day. Hell it's still a good business today, but we need it far less for the exchange of coinage/money which I think is a pretty great thing.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_silver_trade_from_the_1...
The Spanish went with it but the English did not want to and decided to find something the Chinese would want. And they found opium, which they could conveniently produce in their Asia colonies. They also started producing tea in their own colonies to avoid having to buy it from China (this is the reason why India produces tea and Indians drink chai).
Chai is just tea or is it not in India?
Southern Chinese (Min Nan, etc) call it Teh which became tea etc.
You can see that coastal nations got their tea from the seafaring southern regions whereas much of Central Asia, North Africa, and Eastern Europe got it from the northerners via the Silk Road.
https://www.reddit.com/r/etymologymaps/comments/g4bmh3/chai_...
Commercial growing was initiated by the British.
The point I was making is that Indians drink tea, and have a tea industry, because of the British.
The point is that Indians did not reallu drink tea before the British.
The Chinese government wasn't interested, a lot of people in China were and were willing to trade with Europeans they just weren't allowed to do that freely. Of course, this is probably more relevant to the 1800s (and I'm not talking only about opium, it was just easier to transport/smuggle).
It's the same reason we have inflation today. It's just that instead of looting gold from other places, the Fed just prints the "gold" and pretends to not know what causes inflation.
> Banks lend more money? Inflation.
People paying back loans? Deflation. It cancels out. Except the Fed loans out money and does not pay it back - inflation.
> Economy-wide supply shocks? Inflation.
Where does the extra money come from? And what about when the shocks end, why doesn't the price come back down?
> Population decrease? Inflation.
Reduction in demand means deflation.
The Silver Standard: Solving a medieval money mystery
The US was certainly built on plunder, perhaps not of the shiny metals kind but plunder nonetheless.
Selling iron ore and other raw material to other countries? I don't think so.
Don't neglect all the goods and services created by an industrial economy. You can't dig a house out of the ground, nor shoes, nor canned goods, nor glass bottles, nor choo choo trains, nor airplanes, nor textiles, etc.
Japan and Hong Kong both proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that great wealth does not come from plunder, it comes from creating things.
The US got rich from primarily three sources:
First it was agriculture specifically tobacco and sugar both of which are cultivars I believe qualify as plunder.
Next it was oil, which came from from land taken as plunder. This oil was primarily consumed domestically and contributed to the building up of the large industrial manufacturing economy then and later in the 20th century.
Then finally yes the US had a large manufacturing economy which lead to the innovation and information economies of the late 20th and 21st centuries.
It is clear to me that much of the United States' wealth comes from the plunder of the conquered peoples of the continental US, Caribbean islands and Pacific islands.
https://pressbooks-dev.oer.hawaii.edu/ushistory/chapter/the-...
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1681/tobacco--colonial-...
https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States/Industrializa...
The industrialization of America happened after 1800 and took place in the free North, not the tobacco cotton plantations in the slave South.
Where were the Indian tobacco and cotton plantations, anyway?
Besides, explain why didn't the other American countries get rich from all this plunder, too?
Recall all that oil in Mexico and Venezuela? Why has that plunder failed to make Venezuela and Mexico rich?
> Then finally yes the US had a large manufacturing economy
Why do you think that happened? Did the US plunder machine tools from other countries (like the Soviets did after WW2, though that didn't seem to have helped them much)?
> It is clear to me that much of the United States' wealth comes from the plunder of the conquered peoples of the continental US,
Again, why aren't Mexico and S. America wealthy?
> Caribbean islands and Pacific islands.
This is sheer fantasy. A few islands in the Pacific fueled the industrial empire of the US?
Do you actually not know/want to discuss why that is or are you just pushing your narrative which is that "the particular special brand of White People™ who happened to become dominant in the US were very good and very smart and so invented factories and made the US rich and therefor the riches of the US have nothing to do with plunder but with the virtue of these very good very smart very special White People™"? Because I think its clear that the reason the rest of the Americas didnt become wealthy like North America is because of the same habit of plunder that made the US rich but instead of that wealth being sent to Boston or New York or wherever, it was sent back to Europe. How the oil rush in the US was primarily consumed domestically and enabled a huge buildup of industry or how the US has long had a strong domestic supply of steel those places either lacked key resources such as oil or steel while being rich in others or had their social and political structures destroyed by the legacy of colonialism. This combined with terrible governance shows us pretty clearly why the rest of the Americas didnt become rich like the US.
https://focus.bse.eu/colonial-settlers-economic-development-...
https://cod.pressbooks.pub/westernworlddailyreadingsgeograph...
https://read.dukeupress.edu/hahr/article/50/3/583/152678/The...
And I don't think the US did that? Of course Native Americans were attacked and often treated terribly, but unlike with the Spanish, they didn't have any loot, I don't think? That was about land. Piracy ended in 1730, but maybe privateering during the American Revolution and 1812 counts.
It doesn't mean that a lot of terrible things didn't happen, just not that specific terrible thing.
> Along with tribute from the people they conquered.)
Or rather taxes based on land (which was the primary “resource” in premodern societies) and its productivity.
Of course the main difference is that in the US most of the land they took wasn’t even remotely as densely settled or cultivated as it later became (because of the epidemics decimating local populations which weren’t probably that high to begin with). Whereas Roman conquests usually resulted in a significant initial drop in population (because of their extremely violent nature and a significant proportion of people being enslaved and shipped back to Italy).
But Rome (and later Constantinople) depended on grain shipments, and armies depend on grain and conscription, and the basis of that is agriculture.
Pretty much all states in Latin America (outside of the Caribe’s) very independent in the early 1800s, so US had a 20-30 year advantage at most. So that doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant.
Even if we go back a few hundred years there wasn’t any silver/gold mined in NA to send back to Europe.
The evidence in the bones of pre-Columbian Indians is that the suffered periodic famines.
> Perhaps the transatlantic slave trade might also be considered plunder?
It could be. But it's also true that whatever wealth the slaves created was burned to the ground in the Civil War. The industrialized free Northern states' economy buried the economy of the slave South.
There's also the wealth of the rest of N and S American countries, which did not become wealthy.
No, its not.
For one thing, the states that joined the Confederacy weren’t the only states in which wealth was built by slaves. They were most of the states that were still slave states at the time, but many more states had been slave states, and some still were and stayed in the Union.
For another thing, while war was destructive, not all the wealth built on slavery in the Confederacy was destroyed in the Civil War.
> not all the wealth built on slavery in the Confederacy was destroyed in the Civil War
What wasn't was a rounding error. Of course, the slave states didn't have much in the way of industry to be destroyed in the first place. The plantations were burned down by Sherman.
The slave South couldn't even make shoes. The reason Lee was at Gettysburg was he was headed for nearby Harrisburg to loot the shoe factory there. Rebel soldiers were largely barefoot.
History shows that free people outproduce slaves by a wide margin. Running an industrial slave economy has been tried a few times, with dismal results.
In part because they didn’t need to, they could just buy them and other goods the from the north/Europe and focus on the production of cotton which was more profitable and lucrative (the Northern states didn’t have that option). The pre civil war economy was highly specialized and interlinked, the Northeast benefited massively from slavery and cotton exports which brought in large amounts of capital and credit to the country which in part made industrialization possible.
> History shows that free people outproduce slaves by a wide margin. Running an industrial slave economy has been tried a few times, with dismal results.
That doesn’t seem true at all and in fact the complete opposite if we focus on preindustrial agriculture. Slaves were much more productive at producing cash crops like cotton or especially sugar cane than free people.
Name one counterexample.
> if we focus on preindustrial agriculture
They weren't free people. It was usually a feudal system.
I did?
Are you seriously claiming that free workers could’ve been more productive at producing sugarcane in Haiti than slaves?
> They weren't free people. It was usually a feudal system.
Depends. Serfdom had mostly disappeared from England and to a lesser extent France by the 1500s.
> not all the wealth built on slavery in the Confederacy was
Not to say that even the free states in the Northeast massively benefited economically from the cotton trade in the decades that preceded the war.
Per capita Americans were already significantly better of than average Europeans mainly because of much higher availability of land. It’s hard to imagine enough capital and raw resources would have been available for industrialization without that.
It certainly does in preindustrial societes. If we look at Europe before the industrialization there is a very direct relationship between the amount of fertile land per capita and wealth/income per capita (Malthusian trap).
In the 1600s and 1700s North Eastern US was probably the best place the world to live if we look at average QoL (.e.g. life expectancy alone was 10-20 years higher than back in England) and Americans were already very wealthy compared to average Europeans long before industrialization started mainly because of high abundance of land relative to population. Which resulted in extremely high natural population growth.
If that's not plunder I don't know what is.
Because I think its clear that the reason the rest of the Americas didnt become wealthy like North America is because of the same habit of plunder that made the US rich but instead of that wealth being sent to Boston or New York or wherever, it was sent back to Europe. How the oil rush in the US was primarily consumed domestically and enabled a huge buildup of industry or how the US has long had a strong domestic supply of steel those places either lacked key resources such as oil or steel while being rich in others or had their social and political structures destroyed by the legacy of colonialism. This combined with terrible governance shows us pretty clearly why the rest of the Americas didnt become rich like the US.
https://focus.bse.eu/colonial-settlers-economic-development-...
https://cod.pressbooks.pub/westernworlddailyreadingsgeograph...
https://read.dukeupress.edu/hahr/article/50/3/583/152678/The...
> these very good very smart very special White People™
There are many very poor countries run by white people. Any people can decide to become rich by deciding to become free market - like the Japanese after WW2, and Chinese in Hong Kong.
Japan and Hong Kong became very rich from free markets, and no natural resources. Mexico, S America, Africa, etc, are loaded with natural resources yet remain poor.
> terrible governance
Ding ding! A winner!
P.S. Spain never got rich by plundering S. America. That's because they conflated gold and silver with wealth. Real wealth is productive, skilled people using their talents to create things. All Spain got was inflation.
None of this changes the fact that much of the historical US national wealth can be see as plunder.
Not it’s not at all clear. They stopped shipping that plunder about at the same time as US became independent (+ 10-20 years). So both were on a comparable even footing in the early 1800s.
Also there was hardly any comparable “plunder” available to be shipped anywhere Boston or London. How many silver mines where there in NA prior to the 1800s?
The main advantages US/preceding colonies had over Latin America was a much nicer climate in the Northeast i(malaria and other diseases were a huge issue) and better geographic location which made trade with Europe easier.
There was no real plunder to speak of besides land. Which was of course a big deal because it mean that an average American was much more productive per capita even before industrialization began.
Productivity generally remained relatively low (most land was still farmed by the subjugated native populations), trade and commerce extremely restricted by the policies of the Spanish government and most of the surplus was shipped back to Europe.
In contrast in British North America the colonists got to keep pretty much all the wealth they generated.
Granted, they weren't making their wealth available on a market in a way european capital would prefer, but that's a rather different situation than, say, iceland, where the disenfranchised from colonization were a handful of irish monks.
I mean let's ignore the plunder of a fully inhabited continent since it was done long before the US existed. And of course let's ignore Hawaii.
Who owns the Panama canal? It's not even on US soil.
Who owns a huge chunk of Cuba?
Guam, Puerto Rico, Philippines?
And let's not forget my favorite piece of American history/plunder, the black hills of Dakota.
Study your history.
The Government of Panama.
> It’s not even on US soil.
Well, no, its on Panamanian soil.
> Study your history.
Take your own advice. Particular dates of interest you might want to focus on are 7 September 1977 and 31 December 1999, when it comes to the Panama Canal.
The history is definitely one of imperialism, but the claim that it was currently American was 25 years out of date.
The treaty providing for that to happen was signed in 1977.
Should, again, have followed your own “study your history” recommendation.
> the plunder of a fully inhabited continent since it was done long before the US existed
Did the US plunder a continent full of factories and businesses and highways and steel mills and airplanes and farms and computers and ships and ... ?
Living on land that has natural resources does not automatically make one rich. Millennia of history and pre-history makes that clear.
Certainly not the US. Unless you think 45 square miles is a “huge chunk”.
> fully inhabited continent
Not trying to downplay the atrocities but the population density in North America was very low when colonization started in the 1600s. Much of the land was basically abandoned when European settlers first arrived.
> Hawaii
Yes but I’m not sure annexing a few small islands in the Pacific had a huge impact on economic growth.
Same applies to Guam and Puerto Rico.
US certainly committed numerous inexcusable atrocities in the Philippines but I’m not sure it benefited that much from it relatively to the considerable costs of the whole occupation.
> Panama canal? It's not even on US soil.
Are you even sure it would have been built without the involvement if the US?
Seems like something the cryptocurrency advocates could learn from.