Silver coinage developed accompanied by locally produced silver. Gold was introduced in the late first century bce. Both were reformed by Nero, and the system eventually collapsed.

This chapter explores the complex networks and varied kinds of movement of people, ideas and objects that shaped artistic creativity in the early Byzantine empire. As part of a historiographic review, centers of cultural production, ethnicity, identity, style, and decorum are considered. Decades of largely futile attempts to locate the places of production of portable luxury media, especially silver, are presented. High-quality styles can be illusionistic, but can also be based on very different criteria. A more complex and nuanced model for understanding the process of creation is proposed. This chapter concludes with some remarks about Egypt’s significance in the empire, and what the visual record tells us about the distribution of artistic creativity.

After uncovering oil’s role in decolonization, one question immediately emerges: what about other natural resources? Although oil is neither the only fossil fuel on which we depend nor the only resource that produces a substantial amount of wealth, it appears to be the only natural resource that can lead to separate independence. This chapter compares oil and other natural resources to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between natural resources and territorial sovereignty. Through an investigation of coal, precious metals, and natural gas, it argues that natural resources can lead colonial areas to divergent outcomes – namely amalgamation, separate independence, and secessionism – after decolonization depending on (1) their commercial value and (2) the timing of their discovery. While resources with low economic value did not affect the territoriality of states, those with high value resulted in three different outcomes. Resources discovered before or during the process of colonization often resulted in amalgamation into a larger entity. Those discovered between colonization and decolonization often resulted in separate independence. Finally, those discovered after decolonization often led to secessionism.

The seventeenth century shaped Dai Viet in major ways. Like their counterpart in Cochinchina, the Le-Trinh regime directly involved in the silk for sliver trade. Eight tons of silver flew into Tongking bringing the wealth of the nation to a new level. Commerce changed culture in many ways, from the introduction of Christianity to the emergence of Lieu Hanh, a new religious figure connected to women traders. It modernised Tongking’s firearms and financed the seven campaigns against Cochinchina. It stimulated the import of Chinese books and prints, which had become more accessible and affordable to the literati class. Add to this new wealth in circulation more broadly, a construction boom, and increased participation of women. Like the thirteenth century, the Red River delta saw another political integration, this time between the military group from Thanh Hoa and the literati from the Red River delta. It may not be a coincidence that both eras s saw the extensive and intensive maritime commerce both in the country and with overseas. The synergy brought in by the maritime wealth however created a more systematically Confucianist institution from the village up. The autonomous village now became the fixed image of Vietnam.

This chapter provides an overview of Alexander’s wealth by examining the sources of his income and his expenditure. In connection to the expenditure, the chapter provides an overview of Alexander’s coinage. The chapter suggests that while Alexander’s campaigns brought tremendous wealth to the king, much of his useable wealth was absorbed by the army necessary for the campaigns.

This chapter outlines how from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century a mature Tokugawa shogunate recast the Japanese realm’s structures of trade, diplomacy, and maritime defense. It details the ways in which the Tokugawa regime, despite being Japan’s central authority, could not act unilaterally but had to recognize the agency held by the Satsuma and Tsushima domains in their relations with foreign states. In addition, the chapter explains the monopolistic and market tools employed by the shogunate to control key sectors of Japan’s foreign trade. It also explores the broader Pacific contexts – notably a common desire among participants to limit the use of silver in trade with China – that shaped the Japanese state’s foreign trade. Finally, it details the diversity in imported products that emerged by the early nineteenth century, reflected in the variety of goods in demand by both male and female Japanese consumers.

In the early modern period, Japan emerged as a key node in global trading networks. While a vast range of goods were traded, Japan’s position was underpinned by the silk-for-silver exchange that acted as a powerful magnet for foreign merchants. This chapter aims to situate Japan within global trade by exploring the underlying commercial dynamic that drove engagement and the crowded commercial landscape that emerged as a result. The focus is, first, on successive challengers including the Portuguese, shuinsen merchants, the Dutch, the English, and the Chinese and, second, on Tokugawa attempts to channel trade through sanctioned pathways while cutting links with any group that might inject volatility into a precariously balanced system. The chapter concludes by examining the Zheng maritime organization, which emerged to challenge the Dutch East India Company for control over trade routes in East and Southeast Asia.

Following the silver kimpaba displacement from Cabinda to Abomey, this chapter studies how the precious article was received and incorporated in its new home in the royal palaces of the Kingdom of Dahomey, where material culture and objects of prestige were highly valued. Fon artists of Abomey, including silversmiths, appropriated foreign items to create a panoply of articles combining local and foreign elements. The chapter analyzes the silver kimpaba in comparison to other silver articles fabricated by royal silversmiths in Abomey and discusses how the item became an object of prestige and power, until it was looted by the French troops led by Alfred Amédée Dodds in the late nineteenth century. The chapter also discusses the silver kimpabas legacy in Cabinda. As European powers prepared to conquest and colonize the region, they started offering silver swords modeled after the local kimpaba as gifts to local rulers. Overall, the chapter argues, the silver sword embodied the Mfukas increasing power and the fragmentation of Loango coasts societies.

This chapter examines the eighteenth-century silver ceremonial sword fabricated in La Rochelle and given as a gift to Cabindas Mfuka Andris Pukuta following the conflict of 1775. The chapter argues that the object stands for a rich example of the complex interactions between French trades and Cabinda’s local authorities. The chapter explores the work and trajectory of the silversmith, who likely created the sword, and its connections to the shipowner Daniel Garesché and ship captain Jean Amable Lessenne. Like a large cutlass, the sword follows the format of a kimpaba, a Woyo insignia. The chapter explores the uses and meanings of this kimpaba, and its connections to other existing similar West Central African swords. The chapter argues that the sword symbolizes the increasing power acquired by coastal Woyo agents in detriment of the Ngoyo’s ruler whose powers were decreasing with the intensification of the slave trade.

In the 1920s, the Bank of England promoted central banking to preserve London’s control over Indian financial policies and insulate those policies from political changes sweeping the colony. This chapter traces India’s deepening distrust of London in the monetary sphere, and the role envisaged by the Bank of England for an Indian central bank operating under its tutelage. After the failure of efforts to create a central bank in the 1920s, the Bank of England and Whitehall insisted on a privately owned, ‘independent’ central bank as a precondition for Indian constitutional reform. In the end, notions of an independent central bank did not stand up to the vicissitudes of colonial bureaucratic politics. Efforts of the colonial government and the Bank of England to curb the independence of the Reserve Bank of India offer important insights into the early history of central banking in India, but also shed new light on the role central banks in economies undergoing the transition from colonialism to independence.

Australia has a vast range of renewable and non-renewable energy resources. These resources generate energy for domestic and international consumers for a range of different residential and industrial purposes. The acceleration of climate change and the need to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions has opened up new opportunities to generate energy in a less carbon-intensive manner. The shift away from carbon-intensive fossil fuel energy generation has accelerated markets for renewable energy generation from kinetic processes like solar, wind and hydrogen. Historically, the energy framework in Australia has been dominated by non-renewable energy generation. This is largely a consequence of the fact that Australia has extensive coal and gas reserves. Black and brown coal reserves are particularly prevalent in the eastern states of New South Wales and Victoria. Australia’s identified conventional gas resources are extensive and extraction has increased threefold over the past two decades despite the accelerating climate emergency. Most of the recoverable reserves of conventional gas are located off the west and north-west coasts.

This chapter presents a new estimate of the value of coinage in circulation in the mid-second century CE Roman empire. More than 25 years ago, Richard Duncan-Jones revolutionized ancient economic history by offering a first projection through numismatic and statistical methods. At more than 20 bn sesterces, his estimate implied an anomalously high monetization ratio given past and current estimates of Roman GDP, an issue that economic historians have had to deal with ever since. In the first half, a review of the numismatic evidence points to a much smaller role for gold than posited by Duncan-Jones. The second half presents a new model of the money supply. It uses Monte Carlo simulation to estimate the value of centrally-minted precious metal coins produced annually under Hadrian, and then the total coinage in circulation ca 160 CE. Allowance for various uncertainties and other, minor components of the coinage suggests a money supply of around 16 bn sesterces, with less gold and more silver than expected. However, this is not quite low enough to explain away the monetization ratio, implying a higher GDP and more trade-oriented economy than currently thought. Two appendices contain lengthy but essential technical discussions of the assumptions in the estimate.

This chapter surveys the major developments in the economic history of the Greek world in the classical period (479–323 BCE). While agricultural practices and productive capacities did not change dramatically, this was a period characterized by a massive increase in the demand for certain commodities, especially timber for the ship-building and monumental-construction efforts of the period and grain to meet the dietary needs of a growing human population. It also considers the major developments in the supply and circulation of coinage in the classical period and the emergence of private banking and the expansion of credit, all of which facilitated both local and long-distance trade. As trade intensified throughout the Aegean and poleis developed more sophisticated institutions for local governance, they developed strategies to derive revenue from trade and imposed regulations on both the production and trade of commodities in which they had a special interest.