The History of Money by Jack Weatherford

Author:Jack Weatherford [Weatherford, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55674-5
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

9

Metric Money

Money, like number and law, is a category of thought.

—OSWALD SPENGLER

PAPER, BACKED BY GOLD, MADE POSSIBLE THE WIDESPREAD use of money. Paper expanded the role of money to new markets, new applications, and new clients. In addition to the new technology of paper, however, people also needed new ways of thinking about money. Paper could simplify the use of money, but for it to have widespread use, the intellectual system of monies had to be simplified as well. Money came in many units that were difficult to relate to one another, much less to the units of other countries. The simplification came through the gradual decimalization of money, a process that began in Russia but reached its fullest expression in the fledgling currency of the United States and later in revolutionary France.

As early as 1535 the Russians used a system of one hundred denga to one Novgorod ruble. Peter the Great upgraded the system and changed the denga to the kopek, creating a system that survived into the twentieth century.

On March 15, 1719, Peter the Great issued a royal order making one of the barracks in his new capital into the city’s first mint. The equipment in the Moscow mint was then moved to Saint Petersburg in order to make the czar’s new coins, the first of which were merely silver coins from other countries, which the Russian mint restruck in Peter’s honor.

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