Money in the Dutch Republic uses primary sources to reveal how select people handled the multiplicity of monies that existed in the 1600s and the 1700s. The author, Sebastian Felten, does this from the perspective of family enterprises. Those families range from living on a farm to the sprawling domains of the noble house of Orange-Nassau to the household of a rural preacher. The book favors these stories because these people are neither the urban merchants nor financiers that are often the focus of monetary studies of the Netherlands. In the process, the book considers money broadly—as means of payment, as units of account, as stores of value, and as means of settlement. The points are that a diversity of monies existed, that those monies were used in many different ways, and that those ways were often collaborative because the various situations created complementarities.
For example, the book visits the records of a farm family in rural Gelderland to reveal that grain was used as both a form of payment and as a unit of account. A tenant would pay some of the rent in coins and some in rye measured in baskets called shepels. In turn, the accounts of such rent obligations were written on paper using both units of grains and units of coins. The usages co-existed and made sense in the context of managing a farm.
In contrast, the stewards of the far-flung estates of the Orange-Nassau family had to convert the rural system of payments (such as grains, hogs, chickens, eggs, coins, and labor) into a single unit of account called the Artois pound that had no matching coin. In turn, those amounts were distilled into a bottom line that each steward was obliged to deliver in coins to their superiors in The Hague. A table of values then translated coins into paper pounds. This system collapsed the diversity of monies in the rural economy into one unit of account chosen by the head office and then concentrated settlement of those accounts into the coins that the noble family needed to service its many debts.
The book also considers the use of coins at the micro-level. For example, coins found in the home of a rural preacher reveal a variety of inventory. The coins were mostly silver, but some were gold or copper. As the home was near the German frontier, both Dutch and German coins were common, and some were found from Cleves, England, France, Holland, Münster, and Spanish America. It also appears that coins played a number of roles. Some coins were seemingly working cash, but others were tucked in small cases, boxes, and storage chests. Gold coins were discrete stores of substantial value. Other coins were heirlooms. Just because a family was far from Amsterdam did not mean it was ignorant of how to manage a complex system of coins.
In addition to bringing out the stories within old documents, the book also sets scenes with thorough references to the secondary literature. The author explains how metal was assayed in order to mint coins, how the Dutch struggled to eventually standardize their coinage, and how fields were measured by the amount of seed needed to plant them. Often these background explanations have their own references to primary sources.
Money in the Dutch Republic is a thoughtful and meticulously researched exploration into how money was used in select locations in the early modern era. Considerable effort has been put into setting the primary-source vignettes within a larger historical context, so the work is approachable for the non-specialist. The book is a peak into how people used to manage many more types of money than we do today.
