R.J. van der Spek - Money, Currency and Crisis: In Search of Trust, 2000 BC to AD 2000

Money, Currency and Crisis

Money is a core feature in all discussions of economic crisis, as is clear from the debates about the responses of the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States to the 2008 economic crisis.

This volume explores the role of money in economic performance, and focuses on how monetary systems have affected economic crises for the last 4,000 years. Recent events have confirmed that money is only a useful tool in economic exchange if it is trusted, and this is a concept that this text explores in depth. The international panel of experts assembled here offers a long-range perspective, from ancient Assyria to modern societies in Europe, China and the US.

This book will be of interest to students and researchers of economic history, and to anyone who seeks to understand the economic crises of recent decades, and place them in a wider historical context.

R.J. van der Spek is Professor Emeritus of Ancient Mediterranean and West-Asian History at the VU University (Vrije Universiteit) Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Bas van Leeuwen is Senior Researcher at Utrecht University and the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Money, Currency and Crisis

In Search of Trust, 2000 bc to ad 2000

Edited by R.J. van der Spek and
Bas van Leeuwen

First published 2018

by Routledge

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2018 selection and editorial matter, R.J. van der Spek and Bas van Leeuwen; individual chapters, the contributors

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ISBN: 978-1-138-62835-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-21071-1 (ebk)

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Contents

This book originates in a conference held at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam on 12 and 13 December 2014 on the theme: Coins, currency and crisis from c. 2000 BC c. AD 2000. On silver, paper and trust in historical perspective. The conference was organized on the occasion of the retirement of one of the organizers, Bert van der Spek, as professor of Ancient Mediterranean and West-Asian History. The subject reflected his fascination for silver that has been used as a unit of account and means of payment for over four millennia all over the world. The conference may be considered as a spin-off of an earlier research program of the editors (in collaboration with Jan Luiten van Zanden) that resulted in another book in the series Routledge Explorations in Economic History (no. 68), A History of Market Performance from Ancient Babylonia to the Modern World , edited by R.J. van der Spek, Bas van Leeuwen and Jan Luiten van Zanden (London and New York: Routledge: 2015). The present volume focuses on the long-run development of the monetary economy and its interaction with real economic development. It is again an inspiring cooperation of ancient historians, Assyriologists, economic historians and economists, and thus an example of what we may call historical economy. This research is embedded in the work of the research group Impact of Empire of the National Research School in Classical Studies in the Netherlands (OIKOS; coordinators Olivier Hekster and Rens Tacoma) and in CLUE+, Research Institute for Culture, Cognition, History and Heritage, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

We thank all those who helped us in organizing the conference and facilitating the publication of the book. The conference was funded by the Dutch Economic History Archives (Nederlands Economisch-Historisch Archief, NEHA), the Clio Infra project (Project leader: Jan Luiten van Zanden) and the Faculty of Humanities of the Vrije Universiteit. We thank the contributors for their input in the conference, for their preparedness to rework their papers in a tight schedule to fit them into the framework of this book and, last but not least, for their patience in waiting so long for the final publication. We also thank the publishers for their patience and their excellent work in producing this volume. Finally, we thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their support, suggestions and critical remarks. We hope everybody will be pleased by the final result.

Bert van der Spek

Bas van Leeuwen

Routledge Explorations in Economic History

Edited by Lars Magnusson, Uppsala University, Sweden

72. Natural Resources and Economic Growth

Learning from History

Edited by Marc Badia-Mir, Vicente Pinilla and Henry Willebald

73. The Political Economy of Mercantilism

Lars Magnusson

74. Innovation and Technological Diffusion

An economic history of early steam engines

Harry Kitsikopoulos

75. Regulating Competition

Cartel registers in the twentieth-century world

Edited by Susanna Fellman and Martin Shanahan

76. European Banks and the Rise of International Finance

The Post-Bretton Woods era

Carlo Edoardo Altamura

77. The Second Bank of the United States

Central banker in an era of nation-building, 18161836

Jane Ellen Knodell

78. War, Power and the Economy

Mercantilism and state formation in 18th-century Europe

A. Gonzlez Enciso

79. The Western Allies and Soviet Potential in World War II

Economy, Society and Military Power

Martin Kahn

80. Money, Currency and Crisis

In Search of Trust, 2000 BC to AD 2000

Edited by R.J. van der Spek and Bas van Leeuwen

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/series/SE0347

Dirk J. Bezemer , Professor of Economics of International Financial Development, University of Groningen.

Kevin Butcher , Professor of Classics and Ancient History, University of Warwick; Fellow of the Royal Numismatic Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Juan Castaeda , Director of the Institute of International Monetary Research, Lecturer in Economics, University of Buckingham.

Jan Gerrit Dercksen, Lecturer in Assyriology, University of Leiden.

Dennis O. Flynn , Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of the Pacific, and President/Director of the Pacific World History Institute.

Peter Foldvari , Lecturer, University of Amsterdam/International Institute of Social History.

Oscar Gelderblom , Professor of Financial History, University of Utrecht.

Panagiotis P. Iossif , Deputy Director, Belgian School at Athens.