Book contents
- Money in the Dutch Republic
- Money in the Dutch Republic
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Money as Social Technology
- 2 Grain Money in a Farming Community
- 3 Ink Money in a Princely Estate
- 4 Metallurgy and the Making of Intrinsic Value
- 5 Mercantile Practice and Everyday Use
- 6 Patriotic Economics and the Making of a National Currency
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Archival Sources
- References
- Index
5 - Mercantile Practice and Everyday Use
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2022
- Money in the Dutch Republic
- Money in the Dutch Republic
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Money as Social Technology
- 2 Grain Money in a Farming Community
- 3 Ink Money in a Princely Estate
- 4 Metallurgy and the Making of Intrinsic Value
- 5 Mercantile Practice and Everyday Use
- 6 Patriotic Economics and the Making of a National Currency
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Archival Sources
- References
- Index
Summary
Chapter 5 examines taxonomic practices of merchants and other users of money to better understand how early modern coins worked in circulation. After-death inventories offer insights into people’s domestic taxonomies, that is, into practices of classifying, labelling, and compartmentalising the money that people encountered as they went about their lives. Mercantile and institutional account books show how people linked different currencies. Assayers’ conclusions, derived from testing tiny specks of matter, were disseminated widely in broadsheets, coin tariffs, and conversion tables, but also in privately collated notes and letters. This information allowed early modern people to relate coins to one another and to convert them into monies of account which were much more homogeneous. This work was more than merely coping with chaos. People’s ability to match coins with transaction types and geography marked out circuits for specific currencies. The spaces in which currencies like the Dutch guilder could circulate freely thus emerged from the ground up. Users’ taxonomic practices were just as crucial for upholding monetary order as the knowledge work performed by assayers, minters, and government officials.
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- Money in the Dutch RepublicEveryday Practice and Circuits of Exchange, pp. 136 - 174Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022