This chapter synthesizes the book's arguments in a concluding discussion that brings the world of Archaic Cyprus into more substantive conversation on approaches to human-environment relationships writ large, from the horizons of eighth- and seventh-century BCE transformation across the Mediterranean to our contemporary struggles to conceptualize future triangulations of social and environmental change. It first summarizes the explanations for the settlement and land use patterns discernible in the material records from the Vasilikos and Maroni valleys, articulating local heterogeneities with signs of social inequality at the coastal town of Amathus. It then provides a hypothesis for the growth of social complexities during the Iron Age, driven by land management. Finally, Kearns contends that the Archaic countrysides of Cyprus also matter to conversations happening amongst scholars of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, as well as broader public audiences, on the seemingly threatening mediations of society and inequality that our current climatic regimes, and the unruly Anthropocene, present.

The introduction describes the aims and approach taken in this book. This is a study of money as social technology in the early modern world, written from the vantage point of the Dutch Republic. It aims to view early modern money 'from the inside' by studying everyday practices of makers and users of money, especially in a rural society in the east of the Dutch Republic. It analyses how public institutions (through minters, assayers, and government officials) and private individuals (farmers, merchants, and accountants) interacted in the creation and maintenance of Europe’s system of currencies. The specific focus of this book is on accounting practices and practices of material scrutiny because they offer a key to understanding the internal logic of early modern money.

Chapter 1 develops the notion of money as social technology which carries the analysis throughout the subsequent, more narrative chapters. The vivid case of a clandestine Catholic congregation in the east of the Netherlands, which used money to restore its social and material fabric, is placed alongside insights drawn from scholarship about Chinese, African, and Pacific history. The core idea is that technology is a relationship between people, objects, and meaning. Technology refers to a technique exercised within a social context which gives meaning to both the maker and the made object. In the present case this means that an object is turned into money when makers and users make it fungible, that is, when they imbue it with qualities that allow it to be reliably exchanged for something else. This technological approach brings into focus how money objects bring forth and change social structure; and, conversely, where social structures are techniques that create and transform money objects.

Farmers and other rural folk are often pictured as distant from financial centres and invoked as the last groups to monetise their transactions during a long process of modernisation. By treating grain as money and by comparing barns to banks, Chapter 2 raises important questions about this accepted picture and about the boundaries of financial history as a discipline. This chapter explores how a community in the east of the Dutch Republic sowed, tended to, harvested, stored, and kept track of grain. People sustained the material integrity of grain, but more importantly, they also sustained grain’s ability to act as currency in social interaction. Volume measures, owned privately but calibrated by local authorities, were key for the monetisation of grain. Furthermore, the chapter introduces the notion of ink money, normally associated with urban merchants and bankers who made and unmade money by formal accounting, in order to make sense of farmers’ finance in the Dutch countryside. Unlike trade among merchants, where both parties could produce ledgers when challenged, farmers keeping accounts often dealt with illiterate people. These account books provide indirect evidence that day-labourers and smallholders could record and transact monetary value by way of mental accounting. This money was more precarious than its written counterparts, but could be validated by oral testimonial in local courts.