Suchergebnisse

The Dutch Republic was an important hub in the early modern world-economy, a place where hundreds of monies were used alongside each other. Sebastian Felten explores regional, European and global circuits of exchange by analysing everyday practices in Dutch cities and villages in the period 1600-1850. He reveals how for peasants and craftsmen, stewards and churchmen, merchants and metallurgists, money was an everyday social technology that helped them to carve out a livelihood. With vivid examples of accounting and assaying practices, Felten offers a key to understanding the internal logic of early modern money. This book uses new archival evidence and an approach informed by the history of technology to show how plural currencies gave early modern users considerable agency. It explores how the move to uniform national currency limited this agency in the nineteenth century and thus helps us make sense of the new plurality of payments systems today.

"Global trade and colonial extraction drew the early modern world closer together, carving out circuits in which silver and gold crossed oceans and continents.1 What forms did these metals take, and whose practices constituted these forms? The 3,500 coins in the collection of the Dutch lawyer and numismatist Pieter Verkade offers some answers to this question.2 When it was sold in 1849, the public could view it in the Huis met de Hoofden in Amsterdam. Just as the house, which once belonged to the metal trading families De Geer and Grill, the collection was a relic of the time when one axis of world trade had run through the marshlands of Holland before it tilted further to the English Southwest. As visitors pulled out the drawers of Verkade's finely carved mahogany cabinets, a wide world unfurled that was tightly interwoven by coined metal."