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by hnick
2315 days ago
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"Fresh" from the perspective of a population might be more accurate to what I'm saying - not invented from nothing (that was inaccurate wording). The book we're discussing goes into a lot of detail on this, more than I could having read it so long ago now. The wikipedia article briefly mentions this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years "The author postulates the growth of a "military–coinage–slave complex" around this time. These were enforced by mercenary armies that looted cities and cut human beings from their social context to work as slaves in Greece, Rome, and elsewhere. The extreme violence of the period marked by the rise of great empires in China, India, and the Mediterranean was, in this way, connected with the advent of large-scale slavery and the use of coins to pay soldiers. This was combined with obligations to pay taxes in currency: The obligation to pay taxes with money required people to engage in monetary transactions, often with very disadvantageous terms of trade. This typically increased debt and slavery." It occurred mostly in subjugated nations as a way to bring in the new money (from the perspective of the conquered, who saw no value in this foreign coin). It accelerated adoption in populations who had no familiarity with the system, and indeed may have been operating on non-monetary systems still (the book credits Alexander as wiping away many of the last vestiges of such economies). Looking at the above passage, it has some resemblance to company scrip. |
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I'm trying to get a sense of where to put this on a continuum between "I could imagine things happening this way" and "here are contemporary records in which the king specifically states that the new tax is needed in order to get people to accept the new coins".
Postulation isn't really what I'm usually looking for in a historical work.