of their original value, and by the last decades of Song rule (1260s and 1270s), they had become worthless, pushing the economy back to a silver standard.119The Law of the Body
Money and the State
Across human societies, early forms of money have consisted of things that sustain the body (grain, barley, corn, cattle), things that adorn and decorate the body (shells, gold, silver), and things that assist the body in producing the things of life (hand tools of various sorts). Perhaps more than anything else, money has been comprised of foodstuffs, the very fuel of the body. It is no accident, therefore, that we use terms like circulation to describe the movement of money through the social organism, just as we use it for the flow of nutrition within the individual body. Indeed, the greatest political economists of the mid-eighteenth century, the French physiocrats, built a theoretical model whose central concept was the “circular flow” of wealth through the economy.1 Like blood, wealth was said to flow, circulate, and nourish. The original material and semiotic link between blood and money may be located at this juncture.
In ancient Greece, money had such deep roots in communal practices of food sharing that the common meal has been described as “the first money in our culture.”2 Common meals reproduce the body politic by bringing people together in ceremonies for the sharing of food, as well as of memories, recreation, and folklore. It comes as no surprise, then, that money in Greece was often symbolically represented by food and other sources of subsistence, like bulls and olive sprigs. And in a monetized society, of course, it is often better to receive the symbol than the substance: to have money rather than food. For money in such contexts is the means of access to virtually all of life’s necessaries. For this reason, it comprises a vital element of the second nature through which such societies reproduce themselves; it is part of a human-created web of technologies, practices, and institutions that are indispensable to societal life.3 All of these social artifacts constitute a sort of second body for fostering the daily reproduction of people. And, like tools, technologies, and social institutions, money is a bodily extension that can become autonomous of its corporeal base. In modern capitalism, money becomes an alienated power, one that dominates the reproduction of human life.
Ancient monetized economies were not, of course, capitalist ones. The latter emerge where the reproduction of both laborers and owners has become market dependent, and thus inherently mediated by alienated value forms.4 Thus, as Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács noted, as much as “Greek philosophy was no stranger to reification,” it did not experience these “as universal forms of existence.”5 Even when regularly engaged in market exchange, the peasant producers of ancient Greece were not, as a rule, compelled to reproduce themselves by means of the systematic sale of their produce through the market—in large measure because the revolts of the demos had blocked mass dispossession of the poor and the market dependence it creates. Only in the entirely self-reproducing monetary economy (capitalism) does money become a full-fledged substitute for the body, which happens once capital has directly subsumed the bodies of workers to its own reproduction.6 In capitalist society, money directs and labor obeys. The modern capitalist, as Alfred Sohn-Rethel explained, operates as “producer” of commodities “not by way of labour, not with his hands, not by tools or machines which he operates. He performs it with his money.”7 Money enables this by taking command of the labor of others. Its social power resides in the domination of their bodies (as repositories of labor power). In the fully developed capitalist mode of production, this happens primarily by way of its domination of wage labor. To be sure, it can also occur through command over slave labor. But typically, slave labor in ancient society—unlike plantation slavery in the New World—was not commodity producing, notwithstanding slave-based silver mining in Greece or agricultural slavery in the Roman Empire. On the whole, in the Greco-Roman world, the work of the enslaved—predominantly women—largely produced use values (including sexual “favors”) for immediate consumption.
If money had roots in food-sharing rituals in ancient Greece, then we need to track the specific social transformations that made possible its emergence as an increasingly autonomous social power. Food-sharing rituals are widespread across human cultures, after all, and rarely in archaic and ancient societies did they give rise to full-fledged money. It required the specific ways in which generalized reciprocity broke down in ancient Greece to open up the space for new modes of social integration and the emergence of money.
From Food to Metals: The Emergence of Money in Ancient Greece
As the epics demonstrate, food sharing was the basis of reciprocity in ancient Greece. At an ancient panegyris (festive gathering), everyone participated in processions, songs, prayers, feasts, and competitions, and all brought an abundance of food to be shared during the dais (communal feast). Such occasions were certainly opportunities for aristocratic display, with a great man contributing sheep and oxen, much as a male head-of-house did in the oikos.8 But these were also egalitarian gatherings of commoners. Even where they took place at the home of a noble man, the focal point was the sacrifice of an animal, typically an ox or a goat, whose flesh and blood were shared by all. Animal sacrifices were deeply sacred acts, involving offerings to nature and the gods, and may have been substitutes for earlier practices involving the killing of persons, even members of the royal family. In this regard, they observed a social logic of substitution, with non-human animals being offered to the gods in place of human sacrifices.9 As I show below, such a logic of substitution is observed in the history of money, along a chain that runs: people → animals → roasting utensils → coins. And this chain of substitutions returns us to the crisis of reciprocity in ancient Greece.
Sacrificial rituals for augmenting the fertility of humans and extra-human nature have been widespread across human cultures, including the Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. In Egypt, Persia, and Mesopotamia, a sacred status was ascribed to bulls, and their sacrifice served as a ceremonial payment to the gods who regulated food supply and human procreation, while also providing meat for communal feasts. In Greek mythology, the god Dionysus, associated with blood, wine, and fertility, is frequently depicted as a bull. Moreover, Greek tragedy may have originated in spring rites meant to celebrate the planting of crops and, crucially, in the ritual killing and eating of a sacred bull.10 During the City Dionysia at Athens—a five- or six-day festival organized by officials of the polis during the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries—scores of oxen were sacrificed, and an image of Dionysus was escorted to the theater and placed in the orchestra, while select young men led a prized bull into the theater precinct.11 And at Magnesia, in Asia Minor, the stewards of the city purchased a bull at the annual fair in the fall, then sacrificed it in the spring as part of a huge feast.12 As symbols of blood and fertility, bulls were associated with the gods. But in their consumption at the great feasts, their flesh and blood literally flowed through the community, enabling both the physical and social reproduction of its members, and reminding us again of the connection of blood to money. Given their semiotic and material circulation through the community, it is not difficult to see how bulls might come to symbolize wealth in general.
An argument along these lines was first advanced by German historian Bernhard Laum in the 1920s.13 Laum handily demolished the idea that the origin of money as a unit of account in ancient Greece derived from an item’s use as a means of exchange. After all, the inconveniences of using cattle as a medium, passed from person to person, are obvious. Instead, Laum emphasized, first, the sacred character of cattle in Greece, and second, the standardized quantities that governed their ritual use. He observed that various ceremonies required precise numbers of cattle—in the epics they are typically slaughtered in groups of one hundred, twenty, twelve, nine, or four.14 Payment to the gods was thus made in quantitatively uniform amounts, foreshadowing one of the crucial features of money. In the first book of the Iliad, for example, Homer recounts a feast called the hecatomb, where one hundred cattle were offered in a burnt sacrifice:
When they had offered prayers and sprinkled the barley-grains, first they pulled back the victims’ heads and slaughtered them and flayed them: and they cut out the thigh bones and covered them with fat…. The old man burned them on cut firewood, and poured
libations of
gleaming wine, while the young men stood by with five-tanged forks in their hands.
Then when
the thighs were burnt up and they had tasted the innards, they chopped the rest into
pieces and
threaded them on spits, and roasted them carefully, and then drew all the meat off.
When they
had finished their work and prepared the meal, they set to eating, and no man’s desire went without an equal share in the feast (Iliad, 1.447–76).
Note that this ritual feast begins with prayers to the gods. After that, the victims are slaughtered and properly prepared for roasting, which is overseen by an elder who pours wine—another symbol of life and of the god Dionysus—over the meat. The young men carry five-pronged forks, utensils vital to the banquet. Next, the meat is threaded onto roasting spits, implements which would eventually become a sort of proto-money. Finally, the men sit down to eat, each receiving an “equal” share.
The idea that everyone at the feast received an equal share can be found frequently in the epics (e.g., Odyssey, 19.481). And while the egalitarian sentiments in circulation by the eighth century should not be underestimated,15 it may be that the equality in question here was a proportionate, rather than an arithmetic, one: each individual’s portion being relative to (equivalent with) their social standing, with priests and aristoi receiving the largest amounts.16 A similar description of feasting can be found in the Odyssey (3.510–30). Not only does this all look highly ordered, even lawlike; more telling, one meaning of the fifth-century BCE Greek word for law, nomos, was distribution. At the root of law in the democratic polis, we thus find the idea of appropriate sharing in a communal meal: the just allocation of food. A just republic is therefore defined as one in which wealth is properly shared. We glimpse here the reason why, from its inception, the democratic norm of justice has been tied to distribution. And, as we shall see, the word for money—nomisma—carries this semantic charge as well.
In addition to its long-standing link to distribution, the word nomos involved a whole series of connotations that suggested order, way of life, societal norms, and appropriate social relations.17 The social order in question was shared by both men and gods, who communicated and exchanged gifts with one another. The human side of this equation required sacrifices and feasts, often the responsibility of priests associated with hereditary groups known as gene (singular: genos). These esteemed private citizens continued to preside over communal rituals even as the democratic polis developed throughout the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, when city-funded festivals came to dominate the Athenian calendar.18 From Solon’s early sixth-century reforms on, religious life and public ritual were increasingly governed by the city-state rather than noble households. The laws of distribution, nomoi, were regulated by public officials, working with the priests of the temple, as were the rites observed in sacrifices. Crucially, payments to the gods were matters of sacred custom, governed by civic statutes, not market relations. People did not haggle with the gods; they repaid the debt of life according to community norms.19 While they did indeed foreshadow money, communal disbursements of meat did not originate in barter or commerce. As much as sacrifices were a sort of payment to the gods, their domain was that of the divine, not the market. They were holy obligations, not exchange values.
Law, Money, the Body … and War
Another way that money emanates from the body stems from the body’s role as the foundational site of justice. Life and liberty are fundamentally corporeal, involving conditions of human survival and the exercise of bodily powers in the world around us. This is why the very language of justice in the polis is steeped in the idea of a proper distribution of the goods of life. In ancient legal codes more generally, the body is omnipresent, with crimes against the body dominating the law, and with transgressors subject to corporal punishment and confinement. Justice and injustice were written on the body. Indeed, bodily mutilation may have been the most common of archaic punishments.20 It is equally noteworthy, however, that antique codes also provided for a significant interchangeability of money with the body.
One study of seventeen ancient law collections—including the Babylonian Laws of Eshnunna (ca. 1770 BCE) and Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1750 BCE), as well as the Roman Twelve Tables (450 BCE)—shows the substitution of monetary penalties for corporal punishment to have been widespread, and based on the social rank of the victim. In the Laws of Eshnunna, for instance, if a man causes the death of another man’s wife or child, the penalty is capital punishment. If he causes the death of an enslaved woman, however, his own life is not imperiled; instead, he must turn over two enslaved women as compensation. Under the same codes, if a dog or an ox, whose owner has been previously warned, causes the death of a man, the owner shall be fined forty shekels of silver. If the dog or ox kills an enslaved person, the fine is reduced by nearly two-thirds, to fifteen shekels. In the Code of Hammurabi, written two decades later, a lender who beats to death a debtor’s male child must turn over his own son to be killed in return. In the event that he kills someone enslaved by a debtor, he must pay the borrower twenty shekels and forgive the loan.21 In the last case, we observe money’s substitution for bodily injury according to the social valuation of the life involved. Where enslaved people were concerned, of course, money and life were always interchangeable. But this monetary principle infiltrated the domain of law and justice in complex ways.22 We see this especially in the custom of wergild, widespread in ancient Germanic law, in which monetary payments substituted for corporal punishment or death for legal offenses.
This practice of monetary substitution was widespread throughout the ancient world, beyond the examples cited above. Broadly similar arrangements can be observed in the Hittite codes of Central Anatolia (today’s Turkey), from about 1400 BCE; the laws set forth in Exodus of the Old Testament; the Law Code of Gortyn (Crete, ca. 480–450 BCE); and the Twelve Tables of Rome, which were almost contemporary with the Code of Gortyn.23 We also find clear references to such practices in Homer, where Ajax recounts men having accepted payment, rather than direct retribution, for the murder of their brothers and sons (Iliad, 9.632–36). These norms for measuring the value of bodies and lives originated at least as much in the domain of law as that of the market.
While it is misleading to see in these ancient codes a long history of “commodification” of persons24—largely because none of these “prices” was determined by market relations—it is certainly true that these codes exhibit a set of values attached to persons and their body parts. Indeed, in ancient law, unique “prices” (monetary penalties) were often set for disfiguring, breaking, tearing off, or mutilating eyes, fingers, teeth, bones, and so on. All these body parts acquired monetary values in codes that originated with the state. And it was not just legal penalties that were state regulated. In the Laws of Eshnunna, the itemization of financial penalties was laid out in concert with the determination of wages—that is, the price for “renting” someone’s body.25 The state also decreed prices for food and subsistence goods, the very stuff of corporeal existence. These state-regulated wage rates and prices were certainly money values of a sort, but they were not market-determined prices, as commerce was not an autonomous domain of social life. The same was true for the interchangeability of bodies and money in the legal domain, which, unlike the purchase and sale of enslaved people, was not a market process. Indeed, the political economy of the law frequently drove that of the market, with transactions in the latter sphere often adhering to the value ratios determined by laws that governed fines and regulated prices. When individuals were called upon to make payments to the state, goods ranging from barley to copper, and from cattle to silver, were used as standards for calculating their contributions. These ratios, established for purposes of measuring tax receipts and fines, often infiltrated the domain of commercial transactions. Recall, for instance, our example in chapter 1 of the ancient Egyptian policeman who bought an ox valued at fifty deben of copper from a workman, yet paid only five deben in copper, and the rest in a variety of other goods. Similarly, in 1275 BCE, during the reign of the Egyptian king Rameses II, a wealthy woman purchased an enslaved Syrian girl at a price equivalent to 373 grams of silver. Yet, none of the payment was made in silver. Instead, a pot of honey, ten shirts, bronze vessels, and ten deben of copper ingots were handed over, in order to arrive at the silver price.26 Here, a standard of value decreed by an ancient state for calculation of legal fines and tax payments was adapted to market transactions as a unit of account. To be sure, various forms of money did emerge as adjuncts to exchange between strangers. However, where centralized governments had developed, money as a measure of value—including the value of persons and their body parts—was often a largely legal construct. The “prices” assigned by law to people, their property, or their body parts did not reflect their purely economic commodification—a valuation through market exchange—but rather a set of sociopolitical values administered by the state.
To say this is not to deny the role of markets in fostering monetization—indeed, I have shown precisely such a dynamic in the archaic Greek world from the age of colonization.27 But, as I have also shown, market transactions initially came to dominate outside the oikos-centered context of the political community, particularly in the areas of foreign trade, including commerce in enslaved people. Moreover, in societies in which the “economic” sphere was not substantially differentiated from the moral-political one, we should not expect them to show any linear tendency toward full internalization of external market relations. To be sure, relations between Greek lords and peasants were increasingly commercialized in this era. But for lords this involved the use of market exactions, debt in particular, to appropriate land—the foundation of noble wealth and power. Commercialization thus served to reinforce aristocratic forms of wealth and power, while pauperizing sections of the peasantry.
Without a doubt, the growth of foreign trade did create space for the development of independent commodity production. But there is no compelling reason why these developments alone should have triggered a transition toward the much more highly monetized forms of life that emerged in the era of ancient democracy. For that to have occurred, significant sociopolitical pressures must have intersected with and reinforced economic trends. And this was the case for the whole epoch of anti-aristocratic politics—from tyranny to insurgent democracy—as new forms of public expenditure accompanied the centralization of religious, social, and political life around public temples, the agora, and the assembly. All of this, alongside the city-state’s assumption of the growing costs of warfare, shaped the context for the channeling of wealth into monetary circuits independent of aristocratic gift exchange. More than this, the democratic polis, like the tyrannies before it, seems to have deliberately visibilized circuits of wealth by introducing symbols of public authority—coins—that displaced aristocratic items expressing private power. Looking at state assessment of legal penalties, for instance, we see a distinct evolution away from fines specified in precious goods and metals and toward penalties measured in amounts of coinage. A similar trend took place with regard to state prizes for games and contests, where monetary awards replaced wreaths and cloaks.28 And by the fifth century BCE, government officials used coinage for a growing variety of expenditures, including jury pay, funding of liturgies, and payment for attending the assembly in democratic Athens. Beyond making its own payments in coins, the state also required that everyone obliged to pay (or receive) fines do so in coinage.29 Legal decrees further forbade shopkeepers from refusing coins as payment, upon threat of having their property seized.30 The polis thus made its coinage legal tender, a state-sanctioned currency that all sellers and creditors were obliged to accept. In a society accustomed to pre-coinage monetary forms, these actions gave coins an enforced circulation. And all of this was reinforced by the state’s insistence on conducting its own business with coins, especially by requiring them in payment of taxes and fines.
In important respects, therefore, monetization was a political process as well as a commercial one, as the state promoted transactions in coins as part of the political-economic circuitry of the polis. The association of coinage with Athenian democracy provoked, as we have seen, an aristocratic opposition. And no one articulated elitist antagonism to democracy with such sophistication as did philosophers in the Socratic tradition. Yet, their opposition to democracy was inscribed by the conceptual forms of monetary relations. Socratic philosophy thus mimicked the universalizing drama of the money form—however much it sought to displace money as a regulator of social and political life.
Money, Philosophy, and the Violence of Abstraction
What distinguished the new mathematics and philosophy in ancient Greece was their increasing abstraction from corporeal schema. Early mathematics had been grounded in the body. Units of spatial measurement, for instance, were based upon parts of the human anatomy, such as the forearm, which was deployed as a unit of measure in ancient Egypt, and would later be called cubit in Latin. We refer to numbers as digits, the same term that describes fingers, thumbs, and toes—the body parts used in counting. The division we call a yard was derived from the stride of an average-sized adult male.31 In fact, such bodily based metrics persisted even in overwhelmingly capitalist societies into the nineteenth century, with measures based on foot, pace, and elbow.32 The early development of fractions, multiplication, and division also seems to have been related to the body and its sources of nourishment. In ancient Mesopotamia, for instance, the state’s role in allocating resources prompted it to deploy arithmetic to sort out social problems of distribution, such as how to share out twenty loaves of bread among nine people.33 The social challenge of collecting and distributing economic resources, particularly foodstuffs, constituted the practical-bodily foundation of much early mathematics.
In deliberately abstracting from corporeal schema, Greek mathematics and philosophy distanced their concepts and procedures from the everyday problems of embodied life. To this end, they elevated logical reasoning over practical demonstration. New methods of abstract thinking were cultivated, in which thought moved from one logical axiom to the next without contamination by empirical data. Squares, rectangles, and triangles were to be analyzed in terms of their logically necessary properties, not by way of mundane issues having to do with the layout of agricultural fields. Mind would thus produce its own logical protocols while rising “above” bodily sensation and experience.
Reflecting on the significance of these shifts, Sohn-Rethel argued that they originated in the interrelation between monetization and philosophical abstraction in ancient Greece. Crucial here was his analysis of the real abstraction involved in the activity of market exchange. After all, any exchange of commodities requires the participants to abstract from the concrete and specific qualities of the things involved—say, an enslaved woman and twenty barrels of wine—to find a quantitative commonality (e.g., each is judged equal to a quantity of a third thing, such as one ounce of silver). This commensurability is only possible by abstracting from concrete qualities in order to arrive at a quantitative identity. There is, after all, nothing in wine as a use value that corresponds to the useful properties of silver. Market prices thus involve a conceptual and practical abstracting operation that brackets useful properties in search of a quantitative reduction of each along a common metric. It is precisely this that Sohn-Rethel called the exchange abstraction. The inner structure of the latter consists in the fact that “the interrelational equation posited by an act of exchange … establishes a sphere of non-dimensional quantity.”34 This peculiar sphere of quantity is said to be nondimensional insofar as there is no real, physical dimension in which an enslaved person and twenty barrels of wine are identical. Put differently, their commensurability is possible only in an abstract space, cleansed of all real objects and inhabited simply by mathematical values and relations—and it is in just such an abstract space that the exchange of commodities takes place via the medium of money. The exchange abstraction thus operates in the first instance in a purely logical monetary space, where things are effectively dematerialized so that they might be transformed into mere quantities of abstract (monetary) value. The domain of exchange values thus possesses what Marx described as a “phantom-objectivity.”35 Exchange values are real—they move real objects from one hand to another, and make or break personal fortunes—at the same time as they are nonsensuous. Twist and turn barrels of wine, enslaved people, or coats as much as we like; we will only encounter their physical (use value) properties. Their values, as pure quantities represented by money, elude our senses—they are phantasmal. Delineating the exchange abstraction thus, Sohn-Rethel suggested that Greek philosophy created a radically new cosmological worldview by formalizing aspects of the social process of exchange in a novel conceptual vocabulary.
Those familiar with Plato’s doctrine of truth will recognize the degree to which his philosophy, too, moves through an abstract space. Yet, Plato seeks to demarcate the space of philosophy from that of money, banishing it from the domain of truth. Particularly in his most developed text, The Republic, philosophy is so explicitly counterposed to money that the pair can be taken to form “two competing architectonic principles.”36
Plato sets up this counter-positioning in the first sentence of The Republic, when he has Socrates inform his readers, “I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon.”37 The Piraeus was the Athenian harbor, the site of an incessant movement of goods and money, as cargo-bearing ships came and went, and as purchases, sales, and business investments were endlessly conducted. It has been suggested that the (private and accumulative) activities characteristic of the harbor were at fundamental cross-purposes with the public duties of citizens to the state.38 Certainly, Plato’s intent in selecting this setting seems designed to contrast these conflicting principles, as he immediately moves to a debate over the relationship of money to justice. The debate occurs with Cephalus, a wealthy citizen whose home the philosopher and his companion are visiting. Socrates quickly inquires as to whether their host inherited his fortune or acquired it through his own pursuits. Cephalus proudly declares that he has largely inherited his wealth, and Socrates intones that he suspected as much. After all, he remarks, unlike those who inherit their wealth (and therefore do not have to engage in acquisition), those who have made their own fortunes “have a second love of money as a creation of their own,” and this is a source of corruption. In contrast to the “natural love of money,” which everyone has because of its usefulness as a means to satisfy wants, these “makers of fortunes” have an unnatural and obsessive worship of money: “they can talk about nothing but the praises of wealth” (330). Already, Plato is intimating that money has a natural role as a means to an end, but that it can also stimulate a perverse and corrupting passion—an unnatural love—when it becomes an end in itself. Yet, Cephalus is not entirely convinced that money ought to be radically demarcated from justice. In fact, he proposes that the man with money can afford to be honest (he has no need to defraud others) and to honor his debts to gods and men. But Socrates is unyielding. “To speak the truth and pay your debts” are not equivalent to justice, he proclaims (331). Indeed, justice cannot be conceived in the terms of a utilitarian calculus. Unlike money, urges Socrates, justice is an end in itself, not a means to an end. And this, as I have suggested, gives a critical-utopian charge to Plato’s search for a form of good life beyond monetary calculation. That which is good has no price; it is no means to an end. The good and the true are ends in themselves, requiring no external measure or validation.
Cephalus, however, resists this conclusion. Deploying one example after another, he tries to demonstrate that justice is useful—that it is a means to distinct ends, such as payment of debts, assistance of friends, and the establishment of fair contracts. Each time, Socrates debunks the argument. Indeed, the philosopher goes so far as to insist that the usefulness of justice is that it is not instrumental to any external purpose. Justice exists in and for itself, as its own end. “Justice is useful,” he urges, only when all other things, including money, “are useless” (333). Justice begins, therefore, where things with specific purposes can go no further, where they have arrived at a limit point. Justice becomes an end in itself naturally, whereas money does so only unnaturally. In this unnatural state, money asserts its nonidentity with all other things; it insists on its primacy over everything else. Coats or boats or enslaved people can be desired for particular purposes; but money as end in itself transcends all particularity—it presents itself as universal, though its generality can only be false. Against this tendency of money toward pseudo-universalization (the essence of the unnatural “second love of money”), Plato seeks to restrict money to a simple means of exchange, something desired only as a means to particulars, rather than for its own sake. Only then, he intimates, can justice flourish as the one true universal end in itself, free of interference by money’s false universality. This argument is later rehearsed by Aristotle in his Politics, where he contrasts the natural use of money, as a means to finite ends, with its perverse use as an end in itself (which, as I discuss below, he refers to as chrematistics). In Marx’s terms, Plato and Aristotle describe the circuit C–M–C as natural (where a commodity C is sold for money M, which is then used for the purchase of other commodities). Here, money is used to acquire a use value, a specific good. But the circuit M–C–M’—where money is used simply to buy commodities to be resold for more money (M’ > M)—is unnatural and irrational, as money has become a demonic end in itself. “There is no limit to the end which this kind of acquisition has in view,” writes Aristotle. This mode of acquisition never arrives at a natural and rational end; it tends “not for the good life,” but away from it.39 Plato and Aristotle consider money (represented by silver or gold) as a particular thing that is pathologically misapprehended as universal, like justice or truth. But this false universality is a perversion that induces irrational passions and pursuits. For this reason, Plato seeks to limit money to the particular roles of means of exchange and means of payment. Yet, in trying to get beyond monetary calculation, he proceeds to model justice and truth on the very abstracting and generalizing powers that he discerns in money’s unnatural capacities. Thus, while philosophy and money are “competing architectonic principles” in the text, they are also symmetrical. Philosophy takes on the abstracting and universalizing powers of money, the better to vanquish it. Its mimicry of money is on full display when we turn to the crucial books VI and VII of The Republic.
Plato’s innovation here is not simply the idea of a unifying substance that underlies all things. As Richard Seaford has shown, this counterintuitive idea, which seems at odds with the plurality of things that affect our senses, is widely characteristic of early Greek cosmology, and particularly prominent in the texts of Heraclitus and Parmenides.40 Plato, however, gives this cosmological notion a heightened idealist inflexion. Early in book VI, he urges that only philosophers “are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable,” unlike “those who wander in the realm of the many and variable” (484). Here we have a clear juxtaposition of the One and the Many, with truth posited as unitary and unchanging in opposition to ordinary experience, which apprehends the world as plural (“the many”) and changing (“variable”). Whoever contemplates the “being” of things, according to Plato, must turn away from their becoming and their “multiplicity.” The latter features typify everyday, empirical existence, which flounders among the appearances of things, rather than their timeless essences (490). We perceive many things as beautiful and good, he continues, but we fail to attain knowledge unless we grasp the “absolute beauty” and the “absolute good” that transcend any specific iterations of beauty or goodness. These qualities must be “brought under a single idea, which is called the essence of each” (507). Here we have an explicit dualism of essence and appearance, and of the One and the Many, in which truth lies with the former and error with the latter. As in Plato’s doctrine of Forms, truth or the absolute does not reside in things as they appear in everyday experience. Truth participates in an eternal, unchanging, and nonsensuous sphere. This is a realm that can be accessed only in thought, through the logic of ideas, rather than via the medium of sensation.
Having laid out his idealist program, which abstracts a realm of pure ideas from the world of ordinary sensation and experience, Plato then turns, in book VII, to mathematics as the science of the unchanging. The true philosophers, he insists, those best qualified to govern the state, should “go and learn arithmetic … until they see the nature of numbers with the mind only.” Along this route, they will “pass from becoming to truth and being.” To see the nature of numbers with the mind only is to leave the realm in which “merchants and retail traders” deal with numbers. The latter imagine numbers in relation to actual goods, objects, and coins; their understanding of numbers is contaminated by sense-experience in the world of things. The philosopher, on the other hand, consciously abandons the sphere of sensation in order to “reason about abstract number” (525, my emphasis). And here, as I have suggested, Plato’s philosophy endeavors to appropriate to philosophy the powers of money as an end in itself.
The quintessence of full-fledged money is to be the universal substance of commodity exchange. Money transcends all particulars; unlike all other commodities, it is the exclusively universal representative of value. It thus embodies the true essence of all things as commodities—it is the universality that unites their particularities. Indeed, commodities only realize themselves as money. Outside their expression in money, commodities lack reality and truth as commodities (i.e., as goods meant to be bought and sold). It follows that money is the “being” of particular goods, unperturbed by their becoming in space and time, by their volatile movements and price fluctuations. Notwithstanding the chaos of market exchange, money persists as the truth of all things. Money is abstract value, manifest in specific concrete quantities of actual goods, but not reducible to them. Money is not the price of this coat, that loaf of bread, or this automobile. It is the very possibility of particular things as numbers (exchange values)—the quality of things that makes the many different numbers (prices) possible. Put differently, nothing could have a particular exchange value if it did not participate in the very ontological possibility of exchangeability. Yet this ontological possibility resides outside the things themselves as use values, and this “outside” property is incarnated in money. Money is the pure form of exchangeability, in the same way that Platonic truth, like the essence of beauty, is a timeless form that resides in a realm separated from the material world of things. “What is absolute unity?” asks Plato. And he answers: it is that which can be “both one and infinite in multitude” (525). Of course, this also describes money, which can assume the appearance of any number (price) without being reducible to any of them, just as truth can pertain to particular philosophical or mathematical arguments without being confined by them. Money and truth are thus infinite in a way that particular prices and truthful propositions are not.
Having, in book I, disqualified money as the architectonic principle of a good society, by the later books of The Republic, Plato has projected the universalizing qualities of money onto philosophy. Philosophical truth—be it in the form of wisdom, virtue, or beauty—is represented as the universal substance of our world. More than this, for Plato it is an ideational substance, one that is sharply separated from the world of sense-experience, and of the body and its labors. Yet, here we encounter two rubs. First, the philosophical production of truth has emerged as a counter to the universalizing powers of money. Philosophy mimics money’s transcendent properties and emerges only where the latter has already made its imprint on society. Minerva’s owl truly takes flight at dusk. Second, money itself is tied to the world of labor. In the ancient case, this notably involved the labor of enslaved people, as was directly evident in the production of Athenian silver in the city’s mines. And this double dependency—on money and labor—undercuts philosophy’s declarations of autonomy, its claims to produce the truth of our world through mind alone. As Marx would later claim in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, the ostensible autonomy of mind is thus an illusion. “Logic is the currency of the mind,” he wrote, in parody of German idealism.41 Just as money renders all goods subordinate to it by positing itself as their essence, so Plato’s logic, like all idealism, posits the mind’s thought processes as the truth of all things. Yet, lurking behind the world of mind, making it all possible, is a social process that logic conceals—the division between mental and manual labor. “From the moment when a division between mental and manual labour appears,” declare Marx and Engels, then “consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world.”42 But this “emancipation” is a false one, made possible only by the violence of exploitation, manifest in the surplus product upon which philosophers subsist. Determining the world of the mind, in other words, are the labors of “the motley multitude” (Republic, 494), those excluded from the domains of mind and government, whose activity sustains these hallowed spheres. Just as the enslaved person is the secret of ancient money, so is it the secret of ancient philosophy.
Because he was untroubled in his support of slavery, Plato makes the economic dependence of citizen-philosophers entirely visible. In his Laws, for instance, when sketching out his preferred social arrangements, he declares, “Farms have been entrusted to slaves, who provide them [the citizens] with sufficient produce of the land to keep them in modest comfort.”43 The same text advises the master class on how to govern this “difficult beast,” which should always be addressed with “an order,” with whom all forms of friendship should be avoided, and on whom the whip should be freely applied.44 Once more, we are returned to violence, bondage, and enslaved bodies—bodies that were acquired through war, which had to be fought by common soldiers. The ruling class conceived of the latter by analogy to enslaved people. As much as sacrifice of animals had been at the root of Greek culture, the sacrifice of soldiers was at the root of its wars and empire. And this sacrifice was obtained with money.
With the growth of the polis as the space of public life, sacred ritual increasingly revolved around public temples, many of which were built during the eighth century BCE. With older forms of reciprocity breaking down, aristocrats were pressured to redirect generosity by means of dedications to the temples.45 A new egalitarian sensibility identified public-spiritedness with redistribution via public institutions, over which the demos had increasing influence. To court the goodwill of the gods and of their neighbors, wealthy men were now expected not to host private banquets, but to donate to temples. Growing anti-aristocratic sentiment also brought lavish funeral ceremonies, another form of private display, into disfavor. This change has been described as a shift of redistribution, from gifts-to-men to gifts-to-gods; but equally it was a shift from aristocratic charity to the poor, to (rich) citizens’ obligations to the state, which took the form of temple donations.46
As temples became repositories of wealth—and in some cases the first banks in the ancient Greek world—they also took over from private patrons the distribution of wealth to commoners by way of civic feasts. In a society in which the civic and the religious were integrated, temples readily became sites of economic transactions. They sponsored marketplaces and fairs; they issued loans to city authorities at moments of distress; they paid out wages, particularly for labor employed in temple-building projects; and they sold donated objects in order to raise money to fund their diverse functions. In all these ways, temples became focal points for market transactions, while organizing the ritual events at which animals were sacrificed and food shared.47 Goods that served monetary purposes were thus deeply embedded in an economy of the sacred.
While sacrificial animals were undoubtedly among the votive offerings made by rich men, looking at the epics, we can discern other valuable pre-monetary objects related to communal feasts. In the penultimate book of the Iliad, for instance, Achilles convenes an athletic contest to commemorate his beloved friend Patroclus. At various stages of his description of the contest, Homer enumerates the prizes on offer. Predictably, horses, oxen, gold, and enslaved women are among them. But so are metallic goods related to feasting, in particular “a great tripod to stand over the fire,” and a cauldron. The poet presents us with precise valuations of many of these goods, expressed in oxen. The tripod, we are informed, was valued by the warriors “at twelve oxen’s worth,” the enslaved woman “at four oxen,” and the cauldron at “the worth of an ox” (Iliad; 23:702–5, 886). Note again the role of cattle as a measure of value, as well as the interchangeability of enslaved persons with oxen. Equally significant, the metallic objects offered as prizes—a cauldron and a roasting tripod—are vital components of ritual feasting. In fact, evidence indicates that cauldrons were being used as a regular means of payment in Crete by the eighth century BCE.48 A growing body of literary and archaeological evidence further suggests that iron roasting spits—known as obolos—functioned as a sort of proto-money in several parts of Greece by the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.
Iron spits are significant for several reasons. First, they are metallic objects, as are coins. Secondly, they are items associated with sacrifice and food sharing. Finally, unlike cattle, they were highly portable and could be easily combined into packages of multiple units. The literary and archaeological record exhibits two celebrated examples of roasting spits being used as what appears to be special-purpose money. One comes from the temple of Hera at Argos and concerns a decree from the first half of the sixth century BCE by King Pheidon, who is said to have ordered the replacement of spits by coins. A famous account contends that “Pheidon of Argos struck money in Aegina; and having given them (his subjects) coin and abolished the spits, he dedicated them to Hera in Argos.”49 This textual source received significant confirmation when archaeological excavations at the temple of Hera unearthed a bundle of about ninety-six iron spits.50 While we cannot discern the motivation for this dedication of spits, we know that similar offerings were made elsewhere. Herodotus, for instance, tells of a large donation made by Rhodopis, a courtesan and formerly enslaved person, in Naucratis. After having become quite rich, Rhodopis is said to have contributed one-tenth of her wealth to the temple by purchasing “as many iron roasting spits” as this part of her fortune could procure.”51 Herodotus implies that he had seen these spits and, apparently unaware of their monetary function, assumed they had first been purchased with money, although considerable scholarly opinion suggests they were in fact money—or, more precisely, a special-purpose money. Furthermore, we find bundles of iron spits in aristocratic tombs, presumably as offerings to the gods.52 Classicist David Tandy has plausibly suggested that spits served “as a sort of value unit” (or measure of value) for trades among commercially minded nobles.53
Etymology strongly reinforces this interpretation. The basic silver monetary unit to emerge in the Aegean world was called the obelos, a name that reverberates with the word for iron spit, obolos. More than this, a coin worth six obeloi was called a drachma, whose older meaning was “graspful,” or “handful.” We have seen that iron spits were often bundled together in handfuls (drachmae) when they were used as donations to temples. So, this monetary term, too, may well have referred to roasting spits.54 From the sixth century BCE, we find a variety of precious metal objects being offered in temple donations.55 These hearken back to aristocratic prizes, particularly metal goblets, oriental tripods, cauldrons, swords, and other weapons—the treasured goods of aristocratic gift exchange. The gifting of such precious metal objects was glorified in the epics and in aristocratic poetry. Yet, these aristocratic circuits of wealth were self-enclosed, encompassing only wealthy aristoi. In fact, aristocratic art and poetry extolled the sphere of truly precious gifts precisely because it was uncontaminated by the presence of commoners. By the eighth century BCE, however, the values of elite culture were under attack by the plebeian or “middling” sort.56 This makes the appearance of iron spits as a proto-currency quite intriguing. For spits were integral elements of communal festivals in which every citizen partook. Both materially and symbolically, they were thus inclusive rather than exclusive. That they should have been socially validated as a representation of value suggests the evolution of more inclusionary practices within Greek society. Moreover, as we have seen, the democratizing thrust of the period discouraged the rich from lavish exhibitions of wealth, particularly on funerals and burials. As the polis ascended, so luxurious displays of jewelry, fine clothes, and decorative hairstyles declined.57 It would not be surprising, then, if culturally accepted representations of value came to pivot on metallic objects like spits, which were emblematic of the social solidarity manifest in communal feasts.
The emergence of coinage would thus suggest efforts to re-embed wealth and exchange in the wake of a breakdown in older practices of reciprocity. With the erosion of clientelist relations of aristocratic life, the temple-agora-polis nexus arose in part to subordinate wealth to the community as a whole. Coinage emerged, therefore, as part of a project to assert the supremacy of polis-produced tokens of value over transactional spheres dominated by aristocratic luxury goods. Further, as urban temples became the organizers of communal festivities, durable donations not requiring ongoing labor and maintenance (as did animals) might be preferred, if they could later be used to purchase livestock. Additionally, metal objects, like cauldrons and iron spits, might be loaned out when not needed right away. Such items could then circulate as means of payment and exchange because temple or civic authorities would eventually need to buy them back to purchase livestock. As a result, temple goods might have readily acquired a social acceptance as representations of wealth in general. Goods collected by temples could thus circulate as general forms of wealth precisely because sacred institutions were sure to accept them as means of payment. Ultimately, it would not have been a big step for the polis to mint and stamp precious objects—coins—that assumed social validity as means of exchange and payment and as stores of value. But here we need a slight detour, since coins appear to have first emerged in states known as tyrannies. Only by discerning the underlying reasons for this can we appreciate their enduring association with the democratic polis.
Coins, Religion, Law, and the Polis
Herodotus tells us, “The Lydians were the first people that we know of to use a gold and silver coinage and to introduce retail trade.”58 While many of the conclusions Herodotus draws from this origin are dubious, attribution of the invention of coinage to Lydia is not. It is widely accepted among scholars that the first coins, made of electrum, an alloy of gold and silver, were produced by the Lydian monarchy in Asia Minor around 600 BCE. Half a century later, the last of the Lydian kings, Croesus, had the first coins minted from gold and silver. By then or shortly thereafter, a number of Greek city-states, Athens, Corinth, and Aegina among them, began producing silver coins.59
What is controversial in Herodotus’s account of coinage are his claims that the Lydians invented trade; that poor girls in Lydia “prostitute themselves without exception to collect money for their dowries”; that these prostituted women then—scandalously, in his eyes—“choose their own husbands”; and that Lydians invented idle pastimes like “dice, knucklebones, and ball-games.”60 As historian Leslie Kurke has shown, we have here a network of associations (money → trade → prostitution → female assertiveness → unmanly games) that reflects an aristocratic critique of coinage and its effects.61 Coinage is hereby counterposed to the heroic virtues of the noble-warrior, however much the reality was one of an aristocracy that increasingly engaged in slaving, trading, and dispossessing peasant farmers. Yet these elite activities had revolved around use of precious metals, largely a monopoly of aristocrats. Coinage overcame this noble exclusiveness by putting stamped precious metals into general circulation.62 Circumventing aristocratic circuits of gift exchange and display, coins gave gold and silver a new promiscuity, allowing them to crisscross through the hands of the multitude. Coinage thus contributed to a wider dislodging of traditional aristocratic grids of power, and this is where its association with tyrants originates.
Tyranny as a political form emerged across the Greek world in the century after 650 BCE. Corinth experienced perhaps the most long-lasting succession of tyrannies (roughly 655 to 585 BCE), but Athens, too, knew tyrannical rule for much of the half century from 560 to 510. Often, tyrants were dissident nobles seeking to break the domination of an elite network of aristocrats. In reconstituting political rule, tyrants not only concentrated powers in their own hands; typically, they also appealed to the people for support, enhancing the rights of commoners in efforts to curb aristocratic influence. Aristotle’s summary is instructive: “Tyrants are drawn from the [people] and the masses, to serve as their protectors against the notables, and in order to prevent them suffering any injustice from that class” (Politics, 5.1310b).63 The emergence of such tyrannies seems to have been a product of major social transformations.
First, the growth of poverty, indebtedness, and dispossession was rendering aristocratic rule increasingly intolerable for many of the lower sort. It is instructive that Corinth, where tyranny arose first and endured longest, was also the most commercially developed Greek city at the time. If trade and commercial wealth contributed to social differentiation and class grievances, as I have suggested, then it is no surprise that a popular reaction against noble authority should have come first in a major trading city. Second, with the rise, toward the end of the eighth century BCE, of hoplite warfare, based on a mass of heavily armed troops recruited from the middling sort (hoplites), war and politics became more reliant on non-aristocratic groups. The ethos of the new warfare foregrounded mass action, rather than the skill and valor of the heroic individual. As one historian notes, “When these thousands took the field they looked alike…. Farmer, artisan, trader and aristocrat stood side by side; and those who stood apart no longer mattered.”64 Hoplites represented perhaps one-third of the men of a city-state at the time, and an aristocrat seeking to break the power of traditional noble households might easily appeal to this group, whose members possessed arms and an enduring commitment to democratization.65 But as much as aspiring tyrants might mobilize this social layer for incursions against the old power structure, as appears to have taken place at Corinth,66 these democratically inclined citizens could also launch such upheavals themselves.
Returning to markets and money, we observe that tyrants frequently encouraged the growth of trade and colonization, perhaps as sources of funding for a new kind of state. After all, the new infrastructures of public space and power all came with considerable costs, whether these were used to expand the agora, construct temples, foster urban festivals, create water systems, or finance warfare. But if trade and colonization were to provide the wealth indispensable to emergent forms of governance, they could more readily do so if they were integrated into monetary circuits dominated by state-sanctioned means of payment and exchange. The advantage of coinage is that it can incorporate flows of wealth into monetary forms that are authorized by civic authority and that bear emblems of public office. Coinage is publicly produced at the discretion of civic authorities, not noblemen. Just as politics were increasingly recentered—shifting from the noble oikos and the aristocratic symposium toward the agora and the assembly—so were the circuits of wealth, as coins bearing the authority of the city-state displaced precious metals exchanged between aristocratic households. In addition to assisting political authorities in collecting their “cut,” both processes also involved a visibilization of power crucial to emergent democracy. As centers of political life, the agora and the assembly undercut the relative invisibility of aristocratic households as bastions of private power, much as coinage visibilized economic transactions. These processes simultaneously involved transformations in religious life.
“In archaic Greece,” it has been rightly observed, “religion was the sphere of public activity par excellence.”67 But the nature of such activity was undergoing major renovations by the seventh century BCE, as we have observed. The building of temples, the creation of new state-run festivals, the growth of the agora, and the delineation of law created a new public sphere—the collective space of peasant-citizens—meant to displace the power of the aristocratic household. The upsurge in temple building in the late eighth century involved large communal efforts that accompanied the political rise of the demos.68 By the time of Solon’s reforms (the 590s BCE), the polis and urban religion were advancing together, as exemplified in the erection of stone temples, the reorganization of festivals, and dedications of marble statues. All were processes that were extended under the tyrannies of Peisistratus and his sons, who dominated most of the half century from 561 to 510, and which made religion more accessible to all.69
Under Peisistratus, the city festivals, known as Panathenaea, were revamped, as was the City Dionysia, which also became the platform for the performance of tragedies.70 All of these remodeled urban festivals, with their games, processions, sacrifices, and performances, as classical historian Robert Parker notes, were “unthinkable outside the context of the developed polis, with its civic consciousness and pride.”71 As much as reforming tyrants may have reworked the grammar of festivity to legitimate their rule, they could only succeed by adapting their reforms to the growing civic consciousness of the demos. Through the city-state, the demos applied pressure on the rich to publicly contribute tribal dinners to their less well-off colleagues during the Panathenaea and the City Dionysia.72 Private wealth was thereby rendered accountable to a polis that expressed a new civic consciousness.
This visibilization of power also involved a spatial revolution, and places of assembly, ritual celebration, theater, and market activity were fundamental to the development of the city-state around 600 BCE. Much of this was incarnated in the physical stuff of building materials, as Athens went from being a city of brick to one of marble and limestone. The expansion of the agora and the erection of temples were accompanied by the construction of a new theater of Dionysia to accommodate tragic performances.73 Such spatial transformations invariably involve economies of human labor and expenditures of wealth to pay wages, and to purchase tools and building materials. After their construction, many of the activities conducted within these public spaces also required ongoing expenditures, from the purchase of meat for festivals to the payment of poets for their performances. Tellingly, the new festivals substituted cash prizes for competitions, making monetary payments to poets in place of precious metal gifts like goblets or cauldrons.74
In addition, the preeminent Greek coin—the Athenian owl, first produced around 515 BCE—carried the seal of the polis and was backed by its laws. Monetization was thus as much about new practices related to law, religion, and the state as it was about novel patterns of trade. Nevertheless, the owl was legendary for the purity of its silver content, which in part enabled it to become the first real world money, accepted throughout the whole of the Mediterranean trading region (and regularly copied by other states) because of its intrinsic value. Archaeologists have found owls in southern Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, Cyprus, and Afghanistan.75 Athens’s owl coins thus represented a unique fusion of political and economic dynamics: they bore the imprint of a powerful state that could enforce their circulation within its sovereign domain; and they were made of such high-quality silver that they were widely accepted by merchants, state officials, and others far beyond the field of Athenian jurisdiction. They thus represented money’s first full-fledged modular form, metallic coinage.
Before proceeding, it is essential to pause and underline key facts about the production of the Athenian owl. As we have observed, the enduring value of the coins had much to do with the purity of their silver content, which was consistently maintained across the decades. To acquire general exchangeability in an age of nascent monetization, coinage needed a foundation in earlier forms of wealth, particularly precious metals. However—and this is decisive—for much of its history, the silver that comprised the owls came from Attica’s silver mines at Laurium. And these mines were worked by probably the largest concentration of enslaved people to be found in the Greek world—perhaps as many as thirty thousand in the late fourth century BCE.76 In terms of the activity that produced them, the value of Athenian owls—which created the dominant modular form of money for nearly twenty-five hundred years—was therefore rooted in the past labor of thousands of enslaved people. The original world money was tethered to the toil of enslaved bodies. Equally crucial, the reach of this world money owed more to war than it did to trade, more to blood than it did to markets. Like enslaved people, soldiers were acquired through money. And in this connection between soldiers and enslaved people, we are returned to the question of money and bondage.
Coins and Armies
More than one historian has argued that coins were first produced in Lydia in order to pay Greek mercenary soldiers.77 There is a powerful insight here. Yet, to acknowledge the pronounced significance of mercenary payments in the ancient history of monetization need not commit us to mono-causal explanation. Like every complex historical process, the emergence of coinage involved the interweaving of multiple, reciprocally reinforcing historical “causes” whose results were never predetermined. Such processes have logics of retro-determination that can be reconstructed after the fact. Once coinage arose as a multifaceted “solution” to particular historical problems—both political and economic—its emergence clarified tendencies at work earlier and established an after-the-fact path dependency. As Marx observed in this regard, “human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape.”78 It is, in other words, later forms that illuminate preceding ones. Understood in this way, as part of a complex dialectical process, payment of mercenaries was indeed crucial to the emergence of coined money.
For much of human history, the mobilization of military forces was among the largest of state undertakings. Large-scale warfare requires the recruitment of thousands of soldiers, their provision with weapons and equipment (swords, ships, horses, shields), and their means of provision (food, tents, clothing), along with monetary reserves for wages. Herodotus tells us that the last time the tyrant Peisistratus seized power in Athens, he “hired bodyguards,” paying them with revenue raised “from various sources.”79 As the decades proceeded, such mercenary soldiers were employed on ever-larger scales, not just as bodyguards, but as soldiers and sailors for military campaigns. By the time of the Peloponnesian War, between Sparta and Athens (431–404 BCE), both sides were utilizing hired fighters on a substantial scale. One Spartan expedition is said to have contained a thousand troops “persuaded by pay,” while the Athenian navy was bursting with mercenaries. The year after the war’s end, during the violent class struggles that shook Athens, oligarchs and democrats alike hired armed combatants. This was followed almost immediately by Cyrus the Younger’s ostensible recruitment of ten thousand Greek mercenaries in a campaign to win the Persian throne. Even larger numbers of hired fighters from Greece are said to have served in Egypt over a period lasting a century and a half.80 By then, large-scale hiring of Greek mercenaries—in the thousands or tens of thousands—was common throughout the Mediterranean region, North Africa, and Persia. In fact, one historian has proposed that a “military-coinage complex” was in place throughout the second half of the first millennium BCE.81 To get a rudimentary sense of the expenses involved and their impact on the supply of coinage, consider that “to support just one legion cost Rome around 1,500,000 denarii a year, so that the main reason for the regular annual issue of silver denarii was simply to pay the army.”82 One historian has suggested that the only reason silver coins were issued in the late Roman Empire, where the monetary standard was based on gold, was for military payments.83
Returning to ancient Greece, it is easy to grasp the symbiosis between mercenary warfare and coinage. To begin with, it was the nature of the mercenary arrangement that these fighters had to be paid, and it was entirely impractical to pay soldiers on-the-move in cattle, enslaved people, or raw bullion.84 Coins were readily portable and, if made of high-quality precious metal, as were Athenian owls, comprised readily mobile high-value items. But, of course, soldiers on the move would also spend some of their wages—on food, sex, clothing, and other goods. Not only did this contribute to rural monetization, as peasant farmers often sold produce to troops; it also expanded the circuits of Greek coins. At least equally significant, hired fighters, cut off from kin networks and any means of subsistence of their own, became more dependent upon money than before, and more accustomed to its usage. The claim, made with respect to Rome, that “army life taught soldiers to use money,” may be a slight overstatement, but only a slight one.85 Rome, for instance, increased coin production significantly during the first two Punic Wars (218–201 BCE), and it did so in small denominations that were more amenable to paying soldiers’ wages. In all these ways, the Roman army “was a major stimulus for monetization,”86 as was the Greek use of mercenaries during the first century of coinage.
But what was the status of these men who fought for wages? To modern eyes, they often appear as wage laborers. Yet to the ancients, particularly aristocratic commentators, to sell one’s body—and this was the predominant understanding of wage labor—was to be enslaved. The modern liberal distinction between selling one’s labor (or, to be precise, one’s labor power), as does a wage worker, and selling one’s body, like an enslaved person, seems not to be found in ancient texts.87 Repeatedly, those who work for wages, including mercenaries, are compared to enslaved people. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia, for instance, Socrates questions Eutherus about his life and background. As a result of war in his homeland, Eutherus replies: “We were deprived of our possessions abroad…. I am now compelled to procure my provisions by the work of my body here at home. And, in my opinion, this is better than to beg for something from human beings.” Eutherus is thus an independent producer, living off the proceeds of his own labor. Yet, Socrates inquires, ironically to be sure, as to whether there are not advantages to being employed instead as a wage laborer. Since the body ages and wears out, says Socrates, might it not be best to hire oneself out to “one of those possessing a good deal of wealth” and become an employee? Eutherus’s response affirms the Socratic position that we find in Plato: “It would be hard, Socrates … for me to endure slavery.”88 To work for another, to be employed for wages, is to be enslaved, one who sells their body and places it under the command of a master. Aristotle takes the same position in his Rhetoric, where he defines lack of freedom (slavery) as “living under the control of another” (1367a33).
This merging of the statuses of enslaved and wage laborer was widespread in ancient texts, which typically described those working for wages as doulos, the most frequent term for a chattel slave, or as latris, a term meaning “hired man” or “servant,” as well as “slave.”89 This semantic ambiguity must have owed something to the fact that of those who arrived every day at the Athenian market for day laborers, the overwhelming majority were enslaved.90 Indeed, it was not uncommon in both Greece and Rome for enslaved people to earn wages, which they shared with their masters.91 In Athens, enslaved people were almost certainly the largest group working for wages, and in Rome some enslaved people, particularly those with a craft skill, received a regular monthly wage from their masters.92 Thus, when mercenaries hired themselves out for money, they were engaged in an activity that most observers associated with enslaved people, and which seemed to them to resemble slavery. Even several centuries later, under the late Roman Republic, Cicero (106–51 BCE) described the wages of mercenaries as the reward of slavery. Another century on, Seneca defined an enslaved person as a perpetual mercenary.93 Enslaved people and wage earners shared the condition of being under the control of someone else, a control registered in the surrender of their bodies (and liberties), even if temporarily, for money. These associations continued at least into the early modern period in Europe. Hugo Grotius, a Dutch jurist of the first half of the seventeenth century, for instance, declared that there were many forms of servitus. While slavery was “the most ignoble” of these, servile statuses included serfs and mercenarii (wage laborers). The latter were described by Grotius as a “perpetual Hireling,” bound to a master for the length of a contract.94 I have elsewhere explored the ways in which wage laborers experienced social death in a different register.95 But for the moment, it is worth observing that because enslaved people comprised the largest group of wage workers in Athens, this identification of slavery with work for wages was daily reinforced. And this equation worked its way into the very lexicon associated with working for money, as Latin terms associated with wages and trade—think mercantile in English—are related to those for mercenaries, as we see in Grotius. As renowned linguist Émile Benveniste noted, “The images of war, of mercenary services preceded and engendered those of work and the legal remuneration attached to it.”96
This brings us to Marx’s insight that “it was in the army that the ancients first fully developed a wage system.”97 Elaborating on this insight in the Grundrisse, Marx indicates that he is thinking of both mercenaries and citizen-soldiers in the Greco-Roman world as wage laborers.98 After all, in the imperial armies of Greece and Rome, citizen-soldiers received pay, as did mercenaries. Athenian democracy sought to cleanse this payment for service of all traces of servility, just as it aspired to do for payments for jury service or for attendance at the assembly. But these efforts encountered stiff resistance from aristocratic elitists, including those in the Socratic tradition. While poor citizen-soldiers were clearly distinguished from enslaved people, aristocrats also sharply differentiated them from patricians, with their noble “virtues.” Military wage labor was thus a contested category, combining elements of political freedom and public service with mercenary activity (work for wages), which carried undertones of social degradation. By the early 200s CE, when Rome’s imperial army peaked at about four hundred fifty thousand soldiers, military service was unquestionably the primary site of wage labor. The wage system flourished at the nexus of money and war.
“Soldiers and money;” Julius Caesar is said to have proclaimed, “if you lack one, you will soon lack the other.”99 Money bought soldiers, both mercenary and citizen; it purchased the food, weapons, horses, and ships they deployed. And soldiers, as we have noted, in turn spread money throughout rural areas, purchasing food, drink, and more. Money and military power were symbiotically related. We have noted that production of coinage increased dramatically in Athens at the end of the Persian Wars (479–431 BCE),100 just as it did in Rome during the first two Punic Wars (218–214 BCE). Indeed, by the end of the sixth century, over one hundred mints were at work producing coins throughout the Greek world. By the second century CE, it is estimated that the annual budget of the Roman imperial state was around 225 million denarii, fully three-quarters of which went to pay the wages of the empire’s four hundred thousand soldiers.101
Military requirements drove the spread of coinage, not only throughout the Roman Republic, Carthage, and the Hellenistic kingdoms established by Alexander the Great, but also in Persia and the Celtic states. In the case of Gaul, coinage was introduced as payment to Celtic mercenaries for service in the Macedonian armies of Philip II, Alexander III, and their successors. Not surprisingly, when they began to strike coins of their own, the Celts used Macedonian and other Greek coins as their models. Tellingly, they did so largely for purposes of financing their own armies as they centralized political power and undertook a concerted program of state building.102 Among the best-studied cases of the symbiosis of money and state building is Ptolemaic Egypt, which developed from Alexander’s conquest in 332 BCE. Following the conqueror’s death in 323, Ptolemy became governor (satrap), and over the course of more than a century, he and his three successors ruled Egypt without interruption, using monetization to promote state building.103 Not that ancient Egypt had been unfamiliar with coinage, but its usage had been largely confined to Mediterranean trade and some large luxury purchases. What changed with the Ptolemies was the extent of cash transactions, as monetization joined hands with militarization. Once again, much of the process began with the hiring of mercenaries.
“Soldiers and money,” as Caesar said—and so it was with Alexander’s wars to secure his hold on Egypt. To absorb the costs of mercenaries and Egyptian soldiers in addition to those of his Macedonian troops, Alexander relied not only on his imperial coinage minted in Macedonia, but also on coins from newly established local mints. Silver coinage was the foundation of the Ptolemaic monetary system, although prestigious gold coins were also used, particularly for military payments.104 The Ptolemies inherited this monetary system from Alexander, and they continued to use it to wage wars, fund proxies, build armed power, and hire mercenaries. Beyond the introduction of a plethora of new taxes, the Ptolemies also fostered monetization by requiring payment in money rather than kind (e.g., grain), with the exception of levies on land and grain.105 Production and sale of textiles, fruit, papyrus, beer, salt, and fodder crops were all taxed in money, not in kind, as were real estate sales, transport, and services.106 Perhaps no levy contributed to monetization more than the salt tax, introduced in 263 BCE. Effectively a poll tax, the levy on salt was applied to all women and men. Its enforcement drove substantial numbers of Egyptians into episodic wage labor, so that they might earn the money (typically bronze coins) needed to pay the exaction. Indeed, “for many inhabitants of Egypt taxation was the only reason for entering the monetary cycle at all.”107
This should remind us that as much as the development of money is closely connected to trade and markets, there is no automatic process by which these give rise to full-fledged money. Historical accounts that focus exclusively on barter and exchange ignore the decisive role of a new configuration of an institution that has been central to the history of organized violence and warfare—the state. Indeed, there is a compelling truth to historian W. V. Harris’s claim that “the economic power of the state is historically the crucial element in the history of monetization.”108
As the Egyptian case further shows, money can as much be an instrument of imperial rule as one of democratic power. Not only did this involve buttressing the material power of the state; it also entailed the symbolic legitimation of monarchical power. In fact, by 321–20 BCE images of Alexander appeared on Ptolemaic coinage in place of images of gods or symbols of nature’s bounty (such as olive sprigs). The identification of kings with the power of gods and nature was indeed a “revolutionary” change, as one historian notes, and it was soon succeeded by an even more unprecedented twist—the appearance of a living king, Ptolemy I, on coins minted within Egypt.109 As much as they were crucial instruments in building new kinds of militarized state-capacities, coins were also components of the representational apparatuses of imperial power.
Thus, while coinage had emerged as an alternative to the privatized circuits of noble power, it was also harnessed to new forms of wealth and power that eluded popular control. War making and colonialism in the ancient world tended to undermine democratic power in those rare places where it had established a foothold. The virtually endless expansion of war and empire involved monetary dynamics that evaded the demos. As Aristotle recognized, unlike the (finite) accretion of particular goods for the reproduction of the oikos (e.g., the stockpiling of grain, horses, or gold chalices), monetary accumulation is potentially infinite. And since the good life cannot be approached via such activity, Aristotle considered the pursuit of money as an end in itself—which he called chrematistics—to be unnatural and irrational (Politics, 1.9). Here, as we have noted, he intuited the dynamics of what Marx called the general formula for capital, M–C–M’. Aristotle’s perception of these dynamics of monetary accumulation was possible precisely because of the extensive monetization of classical Greek society. And his analysis indicates the problem that monetary accumulation raised for Greek democracy: that its circuits posed ends (infinite accumulation) at odds with the ethos of the polis. These conceptual and practical forms of abstraction, as described by Sohn-Rethel, are antithetical to politics rooted in the face-to-face interactions of democratic assemblies.
By the era of the Roman Empire, money had become a blatant instrument of war and enslavement—something we intuit in Cicero’s conflation of bonded persons with sesterces. Its origins in the democratizing polis had long been buried. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, money did indeed persist, but by no means on the same scale. Only with the emergence of European colonial expansion in the early modern period did monetization surge forward again. And once more, it rose on the tides of war.
Silk Roads and Slave Roads
Even as money, trade, and commerce receded throughout Europe with the disintegration of the Roman Empire,110 they flourished in the Middle and Far East, from Syria to China. The major beneficiary of Rome’s decline, at least in the short term, was Persia, which, in the early 600s CE, seized cities from Antioch to Jerusalem and Alexandria, and expanded trade links across the historic Silk Roads that ran to China. Then, as Persian expansion stalled, a new power assumed dynamically expansive capacities: Islam. Spreading from Medina in 622, Islam rapidly consolidated a political state, bested the empires of Persia and Byzantium, and soon established a geographic reach greater than that of the Roman Empire (doing so in about half the time).111 Imperial rivalry invariably involves ideological contests. Fittingly, some of the propaganda battles associated with the advance of the Islamic empire have been dubbed “coin wars,” for the way in which the contending parties used slogans on coins to spread their messages. I say fittingly because the Islamic empire oversaw a tremendous growth of trade, commerce, and monetization throughout Eurasia and North Africa. While markets in the Christian Mediterranean were contracting, the commercial routes of the Muslim world flourished. Luxury goods such as ceramics, silverware, ornamental boxes, and gold and lead ingots poured across seas and down the Silk Roads to and from China throughout the eighth century CE, as the Muslim empire established the largest maritime trading system in the world.112 As the locus of trade shifted east, so did that of cultural and scientific achievement. Philosophy, science, medicine, and art blossomed across the Arab world, with Baghdad emerging as a renowned center of learning, alongside a number of cities of Central Asia. But as Walter Benjamin reminds us, in class society, all progress in civilization is also progress in barbarism. Accompanying the growth in the arts and sciences was a boom in slaving in Arab regions and parts of Europe. As trade revived across Eurasia, so did the ancient link between markets and enslaved people.
It was the commercial growth of the Muslim empire that fueled new slave trades. The Vikings were central actors here as they journeyed south from northern Europe to trade with the Islamic world. In the course of their voyages, the Viking Rus’ seized upon a prized commodity—captive Slavs, from whom we derive the term slave. These were joined by enslaved Celts and Scandinavians. By the ninth century, enslaved people auctioned by the Rus’ were pouring into Scandinavia, North Africa, Spain, Baghdad, and parts of Asia. At the Muslim court in Córdoba in 961, it is said that thirteen thousand enslaved Slavs could be found. Perhaps 15 percent of the European population consisted of bonded persons in 950.113 Yet, the trade in Slavs, Celts, and Scandinavians was eclipsed by the trans-Saharan slave trade, which persisted for thirteen centuries. Millions of bonded Africans were transported across the Sahara, while millions more were captured in East Africa in a trade in human flesh whose scale may have exceeded the later Atlantic slave trade.114 The Arab slave trade from Africa soon eclipsed that of the Roman Empire at its peak, which, as we have seen, may have involved up to four hundred thousand bonded persons every year.115 It is highly revealing that as the slave trade surged, so did the presence of coins throughout Central Asia.116 Once more, slaving and monetization grew in tandem. Western Europe soon felt the effects, as Muslim traders set up slaving centers in cities like Marseilles and Rome. While some commentators celebrate the commercial and cultural flourishing of the Italian city-states a short time later, they frequently forget that their renaissance, too, was based on slaving. But before investigating these crucial moments in the prehistory of capitalism, we would be well advised to examine the world’s first sustained experiment with paper money.
A Failed Innovation: Paper Money on the Silk Road
In the thirteenth century CE, the Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who lived in China from 1275 to 1292, amazed readers with his descriptions of Chinese money. In his celebrated Travels, Polo included a chapter titled, “Of the Kind of Paper Money Issued by the Grand Khan and Made to Pass Current throughout His Dominion.” He wrote:
In this city of Kanbalu is the mint of the grand khan, who may truly be said to possess the secret of the alchemists, as he has the art of producing paper money…. The coinage of this paper money is authenticated with as much form and ceremony as if it were actually of pure gold or silver … nor dares any person, at the peril of his life, refuse to accept it in payment. All his subjects receive it without hesitation…. With it, in short, every article may be procured.117
China was already an innovator in many fields. One of the world’s oldest civilizations, dating to the second millennium BCE, it was the first state to produce gunpowder, paper, and print. The latter technologies also enabled it to invent paper money. Yet, for many centuries before that, the country had deployed a variety of monetary forms, from leather currency to metallic coins—the latter usually composed of bronze, often in the shape of knives or spades. While bronze coins served as means of exchange for everyday buying and selling, large payments for the likes of bond servants, horses, and manor houses tended to be made in precious commodities such as gold, silk, paper, and silver. During the period of the Five Dynasties (907–960 CE), iron coins were widespread, and in the latter part of the era, silver ingots were cast as coins. Under the Song dynasty (960–1279), China entered into a four-century experiment with paper money, long before such currency was used in Europe. Just as much coinage had been, paper money was at first privately produced, largely as notes that enabled merchants to move financial assets from one region to another without having to transport coins. But state officials soon got into the game, seeing paper notes as a way to increase the money supply at a time when military payments, particularly for the provision of troops, were stretching government expenditure. By 1189 the Jin dynasty had begun directly producing paper currency. So effective was this state-produced paper money that it was copied by the Mongol invaders who established the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368). It would not be long before the Yuan’s paper money was imposed as the exclusive currency—a form of fiat money. Committed as they were to this innovation, China’s Mongol leaders exported it throughout Southeast Asia, though this did not go especially well.118
It was the notes produced under the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan that famously drew the amazement of Polo. So taken by this currency was Polo that he suggested the Khan had come to “possess the secret of the alchemists,” enabling him to conjure wealth out of mere paper. In truth, however, China’s paper currency was already in the early stages of collapse. The Mongols, creators of an impressive empire, certainly tried to expand the sphere of paper money. Yet the foundations of Chinese paper currency were not amenable to a new monetary form with extensive geographic and economic reach. Largely, this had to do with the temptation on the part of the kingdom’s rulers to increase the supply of paper money out of proportion to its backing in precious metals. The result, even by the early 1100s under the Song dynasty, was a persistent devaluation of paper currency. By 1223, the state’s notes were circulating at of their original value, and by the last decades of Song rule (1260s and 1270s), they had become worthless, pushing the economy back to a silver standard.119
The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) revived the experiment with paper money, and at first, it seemed to do so successfully, as the agricultural economy rebounded and tax collection improved. But as the state kept churning out notes to cover ambitious ship- and canal-building plans and ongoing military buildup, the economy experienced a fifteenth-century version of a credit crunch. So severe was the inevitable collapse that paper notes eventually traded at 0.3 percent of their nominal value. The meltdown of China’s paper currency was part of a world depression of the fifteenth century, which I discuss in the next section. Like most of Europe, China did revive in the second half of the century. But by then, the locus of dynamism was shifting west. As other powers ascended, China’s influence and power stalled—as did its experiment with paper money. By the second half of the fifteenth century, it appears that China’s paper notes had virtually disappeared.120 As innovative as China’s rulers had been in monetary affairs, their reliance on taxes raised on marginal peasant surpluses could not provide the wealth necessary to sustain imperial power or to underpin a new mode of world money. When a genuinely successful paper currency arrived—via the Bank of England in the 1690s—it would be on the wings of a new (and capitalist) regime of empire and war.
Before the Empire of Capital: European Money, Colonization, and Slaving from the Crusades to Columbus
There was, however, little reason to imagine at the time that Western Europe would ever emerge as the locus of economic, technological, and military dynamism. Notwithstanding the earlier successes of the Greek and Roman Empires, for a full millennium, from roughly 600 to 1600 CE, Europe was a laggard. By many criteria, both China and the Islamic world were world leaders in scientific knowledge, cultural production, technological innovation, and economic dynamism.121 Yet, after its laggard millennium, Europe was to be the site of a new mode of capitalist empire, sustained by a hegemonic form of paper money. This is the story of the next two chapters. For the moment, let us attend to the burst of early modern European colonization and its connections to slaving.
In July 1099, the knights of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem in the name of their Lord. However, ideology and culture are always part of a social-historical ensemble involving forms of production, appropriation, and warfare; and so it was with the Christian assault on the Middle East. From Jerusalem, they quickly extended their reach to Tripoli, Tyre, and Antioch. Even before the first knights reached the holy city, fleets had set out from Venice, Genoa, and Pisa bound for Palestine and Syria. War, of course, has always been an economic enterprise, bringing booty to the conquerors, and the Crusades would be no different. For their role in the siege of Acre in 1100, Venetian adventurers received one-third of all plunder, immunity from taxes, and a church and a market square in every conquered city. After Christian knights were routed in battle at the Field of Blood in 1119, a Venetian fleet arrived in Jerusalem, providing a loan to its Christian leaders. In return they were again promised a church and a city square, alongside a street and annual payments in every royal and baronial city in the Crusaders’ kingdom.122 But the appeal to commercial self-interest was nowhere so blatant as in a widely circulated letter from the French abbot Bernard de Clairvaux. Taking up the call for a Second Crusade in 1145, Clairvaux, who would later be sainted, deployed the idiom of a modern-day investment advisor, imploring prospective Crusaders: “To those of you who are merchants, men quick to seek a bargain, let me point out advantages of this great opportunity. Do not miss them!”123
Before the Crusades began in the 1090s, the Italian city-states, particularly Venice, had entered into a new cycle of expansion, largely due to their participation in the medieval trade in slaves. Soon they were extending their reach into North Africa—a harbinger of things to come. By 1180, more than a third of Genoa’s trade was with Africa’s northern region.124 Already, foundations were being laid for the great wave of slave-based colonization that would make the modern world. However, we ought not be deceived: the European colonization of the late medieval period took a predominantly feudal form. A failure to recognize this vitiated the historical analysis famously proffered by Henri Pirenne, who saw the Crusades as the launchpad for capitalism.125 To be sure, late-medieval Europe was the site of a commercialized feudalism, one with roots in the corporate trading structures of the feudal towns as well as in the noble estates of the countryside. Yet, the lands colonized by Europeans at this time were most often brought under recognizably feudal forms of ownership and regulation, often involving seigneuries, fiefs, and knight service. This was especially true of the French and Italian colonies in the Middle East. But a number of these elements were also typical of the early Portuguese colonies in the Canary Islands, Madeira, and the Azores—all off the northwest coast of Africa.126
Slavery was also a common characteristic of these medieval and early modern European colonies. This was just one feature that would be continuous with the fully capitalist colonization (particularly of the Americas) that emerged powerfully after 1650. Indeed, all great historical transformations involve complex social processes that rework seeming continuities into new social ensembles. Older practices, such as slavery and colonization, get refashioned into new constellations of power and production, just as aristocratic forms were both preserved and transformed throughout the rise of capitalism in England. To the extent that relations and processes that developed within one social form of life and production can later be seen as incubators for emergent relations and dynamics, they must themselves be substantively reshaped.127 So, as much as we can detect precursors of capitalism in the trading, slaving, and colonizing processes of European states during the late medieval period, the fundamental dynamics of global commerce remained predominantly feudal.
The framework for substantial growth in trade and markets was created across the Mongol “global century,” 1250–1350, in which the Mongol Empire stitched together a trading system that oversaw one hundred years of commercial growth and increasing monetization. Large chunks of Europe prospered throughout the Mongol century, the Italian city-states among them, while southern India and China, too, experienced a century-long economic upswing.128 Lubricating the commercial expansion was silver, which played the role of world money across Eurasia as it flowed from Western Europe, the Near East, Africa, and parts of Asia in exchange for goods from the Far East, such as spices, ceramics, raw silk, and silk textiles.129 Gold, meanwhile, had become the primary currency of Europe by the fourteenth century, a position that would be further consolidated as Portugal increased its African supplies of the precious metal.130 But even gold migrated east, albeit not as dramatically as did silver. Government officials from Cairo to London complained about this persistent drain of bullion to the East. Yet, complain as they might, the Euro-Asian economy was structurally imbalanced. Europe’s ever-growing demand for Eastern goods required a systematic outflow of precious metals. And here lay a critical vulnerability: should Europe prove incapable of generating new supplies of silver and gold, the money that lubricated this gigantic trading system would dry up, causing the gears of trade to seize. Precisely this happened in the general economic crisis of the fifteenth century.
The idea of a world economic slump prior to capitalism may come as a surprise, yet there is little doubt that during the first half of the century, “almost all parts of the then-known world experienced a deep recession … the absolute level of inter-societal trade dropped, currencies were universally debased, and the arts and crafts were degraded,” in the words of Janet Abu-Lughod.131 Crucial here was a massive contraction of the money supply—in this sense the crisis involved a classic liquidity crunch.132 Mining and silver supplies plummeted across Asia and Europe, severely reducing the latter’s capacity to buy goods from the East. The inevitable result was a massive contraction in production and exchange. In China, this was accompanied by a popular turn against paper money, due to a growing mistrust of any currency that lacked adequate underpinning by precious metal. After all, metallic coinage remained the modal form of money. In a Eurasian economy based on bullion, paper currency was ultimately credible only if it was readily convertible into precious metal (in raw or coined form) at stable rates of exchange. As the crisis wore on, this was anything but the case. The initial reaction by the leaders of China’s Ming dynasty was to offset their crisis through military and commercial expansionism. The Ming rulers sent invading armies into Southeast Asia, grabbed land in Manchuria, drove military forces deep into Mongol territory, and sent naval expeditions as far as the Red Sea and East Africa.133 In the end, however, the associated military costs were unsustainable in the context of declining production, trade, and taxes. Shortages of silver and gold guaranteed that the crisis would be accompanied by a collapse of paper money. A period of austerity and retrenchment followed, and while the Chinese economy did eventually revive, things would never be the same. The center of the postcrisis global economy was demonstrably shifting west.
By 1450, a new international constellation was forming around three vital elements. The first we might call the Columbian moment: the new burst of Atlantic colonization that began with Portugal’s seizure of islands off the northwest coast of Africa, and then extended to the Americas and further parts of both Asia and Africa. The second was the extensive looting of precious metals. Gold was critical in the early going, and modest West African supplies were soon swelled by violent expropriation of treasures from Mexico. Soon, however, New World silver moved to the forefront. At Potosí, in what is now Bolivia, the Spanish extracted mind-boggling stocks of silver. By 1600, this mining town had one hundred fifty thousand inhabitants, and for over a century it churned out half of the world’s silver supply. So gigantic were the shipments of gold and silver from the Americas that their value rocketed from just over one million pesos in the early years of the sixteenth century (1503–10) to almost seventy million in its final decade (1591–1600). By that time, the Spanish “piece of eight,” a silver coin worth eight reals, had become a world currency.134 The third element of the emerging global configuration was a new wave of enslavement of Africans, which included putting black labor to the cultivation of sugar. European colonizers first undertook sugar production, often by means of slave labor, in Syria and Palestine during the era of the Crusades. Sugar plantations also developed in Sicily and Muslim Spain in the late medieval period. But by the fifteenth century, Portugal and Spain were opening new social frontiers with slave-based sugar cultivation in Madeira and the Canary Islands. In the coming decades, Portugal would extend its sugar-slave complex to Brazil, and Spain to Española (Haiti).135 Before long, however, Spain and Portugal would encounter a new imperial rival in Holland. But Dutch hegemony, in turn, soon confronted another challenger. From 1655, the year England seized Jamaica from Spain, its military and colonial undertakings began to surpass those of its Dutch rivals. English dominance would be world transformative, as it reconfigured the three elements described—money, colonization, and slaving—on the foundations of an emerging capitalist mode of production. An epochal shift was in the making, one that would usher in a global empire based on new dynamics of exploitation and a novel form of money. In the fifteenth century, the westward shift of global power might have been masked by continuing and massive flows of New World gold and silver to India, China, and Central Asia. But by the middle of the seventeenth century there could be no doubt: the world order was undergoing profound transformation. Looking back, it is easy to see why. In the words of one historian, “It was Europe’s entrenched relationship with violence and militarism that allowed it to place itself at the centre of the world after the great expeditions of the 1490s.”136 Indeed it was. But violence and militarism, as I have intimated, were being reorganized on an unprecedented socioeconomic terrain, one involving new modalities of money and exploitation. With these, a new order of empire was about to be unleashed upon the world.