Money is beautiful, money is interesting, money gives freedom – but like a spinning top, it must be kept in motion. Accumulate it and you become a slave… But where or from what does money arise? And why does its value rise and fall so frequently? Here you will find the answers.

1. The birth of writing – the basis of money

The ancient Middle East was the cradle of civilisation. Similar to Egypt, Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) became a fertile land through irrigation to nourish its dense population. This led to the development of water mills, canals, the invention of writing and government administration. The latter were initially city-states; later empires were founded with the aim of uniting the entire then known world between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean and ruling it from one centre – first Akkad, then Ur and finally Babylon. It was at this time that the fatal idea of ​​world superiority came into being.

2. Clay tablet with cuneiform from the Old Akkadian period of Mesopotamia, around 2350-2150 BC

The Greek word “write” literally means “to scratch”. The reason for this is the development of writing. The oldest form of writing, developed in the lime-rich lowlands of Mesopotamia at the end of the fourth millennium BC, was cuneiform writing. One took an angular tool and pressed it into the clay, thus making thin signs. Cuneiform writing was also used in Egypt, in addition to Mesopotamia, where people wrote with hieroglyphs. They are the two oldest forms of writing, and they both used hundreds of different signs. Only a small elite was able to use them. This clay tablet from the Old Akkadian period displays a list of various items: jars of fine oil, loaves of bread and some quantity of flour are mentioned.

3. Gold stater of the Lydian king Croesus (561-546 BC), minted in Sardis

When people went from being self-reliant to being traders and consumers, generally recognized means of payment became necessary; accumulated surpluses had to be preserved, and exchanged when necessary. Only metals could fulfill this function: daggers (in Greek: oboloi), axes, ingots, and later coins. This is one of the earliest coins: a gold stater, issued by King Croesus. Instead of the coins used before from electrum (a natural alloy of gold and silver), Croesus had money made of gold and silver. Croesus thus introduced the bimetallic coinage system that was used in the Western world until the 20th century. The word “stater” is based on the Greek word for weight that was used to balance a scale. Staters existed in different weights, but they were always the highest denomination of a coin series. The importance of this coin, over 2,500 years old, lies in the fact that it enabled the first system of free and open markets. The result was the rich culture of the ancient Mediterranean world.

4. The Persian Empire

The most influential region before the rise of the Romans was the Persian Empire. It united a wide variety of peoples under the relatively tolerant rule of the great kings. Independent satrapies ruled the provinces, albeit controlled by royal secret agents. The Persian Royal Road operated the world’s first postal service, albeit only in the service of the great king.

5. Persians and the Greeks

Viewed geographically, Europe should be a part of Asia. And indeed repeated invaders from Asia – Huns, Mongols and other Asiatics – tried to integrate politically the tiny landmass at the far western end of the continent. The Greeks have earned the credit for fending off the Persians in their initial attempt to absorb Greece in the battles at Marathon and Salamis. What Europe would look like today if the Persians had won those battles is a striking yet unanswerable question.

6. Tetradrachm of the city of Athens minted around 455 BC

This is the world’s first major trade coin. Such “owls”, as these coins were called for their unadorned design, were issued from 510 to 38 BC. The owl was the attribute of the city of Athens’ patroness Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Most of these coins were minted in the mid-5th century AD. At that time the Greek cities of the Delian League had to pay tribute money to Athens. These tributes were used to build the Parthenon and other great buildings. The tetradrachm, coins worth 4 drachmas, remained the leading currency in the Mediterranean for hundreds of years.

7. Alexander’s Empire

After Alexander the Great had conquered the world to the east, he planned a campaign westward and hence world domination. Organized resistance was to be expected only from Carthage, as Rome was still grappling with its closest neighbors. Yet if Alexander had not died at the age of 33, however, his world domination would have barely worked. There was much internal resistance – his Macedonian soldiers rebelled because Alexander forced them to take Persian wives and Persian emperors as counselors; without them, however, the vast empire would not have been governable.

8. Tetradrachm of Macedonian King Alexander III (336-323 BC), minted in Memphis, Egypt

Alexander the Great conquered the entire Persian Empire and Egypt between 334 and 331 BC. When he died in Babylon in 323 BC, his empire stretched from Greece to India. At that time Greek became a world language and Alexander’s coins a world currency. This tetradrachm shows Alexander in the guise of the Greek hero Heracles. Coins like this were issued in large numbers. Whenever a new city was captured, silver hoards minted in its temples were cast into coins. This increased cash flow in the realm, which in turn triggered trade. Even though Alexander’s reign lasted only 13 years, he restored Greek glory like no other Greek before him.

9. Roman wars of conquest

Rome achieved naval supremacy through the Punic Wars. As a result the ancient culture that had hitherto been known only in the Orient and the eastern Mediterranean was spread throughout the Mediterranean world. With Pompey’s campaign in the East (66-63 BC) began a series of Roman conquests, with which the respective commanders tried not only to subjugate foreign territories, but also to recruit strong armies to obtain leadership in Rome. The main candidates for sole rule – Pompey, Crassus and Caesar – united in the first triumvirate in 60 BC. With his conquest of Gaul a few years later, Julius Caesar brought Roman culture, especially the Latin language that would later develop into French, to the little cultivated northern lands; with it he became one of the first builders of Europe. Along the way he also gained enormous wealth and a loyal and strong army.

10. Denarius of the Roman Republic, 211 BC

The silver denarius was introduced around 211 BC. It was modeled after Rome’s old bronze currency: the X to the left of Roma’s head represented 10 bronze asses; the name “denarius” is Latin and means “tenant.” Silver denarii were used to pay mercenaries for their military services, since they had no use for the heavier Roman bronze coins. At the same time the denarius was the same weight as the Greek drachma, which was convenient for trade. The coin’s coinage always depicted Roma, the goddess of the city of Rome, with a helmet and an X as a sign of value. Initially Rome used heavy bronze lumps for money, later combining fine bronze coins for internal trade and Greek silver coins for distant trade.

This system collapsed during the chaos of the Second Pinnic War, and was replaced by the denarius in 211 BC. In the 2nd century AD, the Roman denarius was used from the shores of the Black Sea to Britain, and from North Africa to the Danube River – in other words, the denarius’ area of ​​circulation was far larger than that of the modern euro. As a coin, the denarius existed until the great inflation of the 3rd century AD. Its name, however, survived into modern times in the British penny, abbreviated to d, in the French denier, in the German Pfennig, and in the Italian denaro.

11. Byzantine Empire

With the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, the ancient Roman history of the Roman Empire ends. The Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantine Empire, lasted through the Middle Ages until 1453, however. It reached an impressive size in 628 by the conquests of Emperor Justinian, who reunited the western lands previously lost to the Goths and Vandals. Yet the Byzantine Empire was soon diminished again, first by the Lombards, and then by the Arabs.

12. Solidus of the Byzantine emperor Constantine I (307-337), minted in 314 in Trier

This coin documents the transfer of the center of power from Rome to Constantinople: the reverse of the solidus shows the goddess Roma handing a globe to the ruler of Constantinople. The Byzantine Empire lasted for more than a millennium. In the year 330, the emperor Constantine moved the capital to Byzantium, which was designated Constantinople. Until 1453, when the city was conquered by the Ottomans under Mohammed II, Byzantium formed a protective barrier between the Occident and the Orient. Antiquity, the Orient and the Occident were amalgamated in Byzantine art. It was the patronage of Greek and Roman art in Byzantium that foreshadowed the Renaissance in the 15th century.

The currency of the Byzantine Empire was the golden solidus. This coin became the link between the coin systems of antiquity and the Middle Ages, as it was minted under different names and with different paphulis until the 14th century. People of the Migration Period first copied the solidus, and later a third of a solidus, the timisis. Due to the Arabic conquest of the Mediterranean, the gold supply for Europe meanwhile decreased bit by bit, however, and silver became the prevalent coinage metal. Gold came into circulation again in the 13th century, first in Spain in the form of Arabic gold coins, then in southern Italy, and finally in northern Italian cities as well. From there, gold coins eventually spread throughout Europe again.

13. Spread of Islam

When the Prophet Muhammad founded the Islamic religion, he united the conquered Arabic tribes into a people of world conquerors. The dynasty of the Umayyads in Damascus formed the first Islamic Caliphate. They extended the Islamic empire into Turkistan, North Africa, Spain, and the Punjab region. In 750, the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyad Caliphate. The Umayyads moved to Al-Andalus, where they created a realm that led to a blossoming of Arab culture in Spain. The Umayyads in Damascus developed the first distinctive Islamic-Arabic coins, which were used as models by the following Islamic dynasties and rulers: the nonpictorial golden dinar and the silver dirham that bore suras from the Quran and were dated after the Hijrah*. The dinars weighed the same as the Byzantine solidi, yet their name was derived from the Roman denarius. One golden dinar equaled 10 silver dirhams. Finds from Scandinavia and the Baltic and Slavic countries prove that the dirham was the major Arab trade coin for over 300 years.

14. Dirham of the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (685-705), minted in 699-741

Derived from the Persian drachma of the Sassanid dynasty, the dirham became the silver currency of the Arab coinage system. As a coin of account it was introduced only in 632, shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The first actual silver dirham was issued during the reign of the fifth Umayyad caliph, Abd al-Malik. In his currency reform of 695/96, he also enforced the Islamic ban on depicting God and his creation on coin designs. This coin is one of the first coins issued after the reform. On the obverse of each Islamic coin can be read this inscription: “There is no god but Allah. He has no partners.” Abd al-Malik’s dirham spread throughout the caliphate, from Bactria to Spain, and was issued at several different mints. Its greatest circulation was found from 800 to 1012. The name “dirham” is used to this day in some Islamic countries, namely in Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.

15. The Islamic world today

By the 6th century the Arabs were divided into many tribes and groups. They were mostly Bedouins (nomads) led by sheikhs, having in common only their Semitic language and tradition, as well as the holy city of Mecca and the sanctuary of the Kaaba. In the 7th century, the Prophet Muhammad founded the Islamic religion and thus united the Arab world. Muhammad’s successors expanded Arab power beyond the Arabian Peninsula, creating an Arabic sphere of influence that stretched from northwest India to Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, southern Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula to the Pyrenees. The dinar became the internationally accepted gold coin, the dirham the silver coin of Arab countries.

The first Islamic dynasty was the Umayyads, founded by Muawiyah I, governor of Syria, who declared himself caliph in 660. However, not all Muslims accepted Muawiya as their rightful ruler. This resulted in a split between the Sunnis, followers of Muawiya, and the Shiites, followers of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. This split is a problem for the Islamic world to this day. Sunnis are the majority in most Islamic countries. The Shiites initially had their center in the south of modern Iraq; today they are the majority in the so-called Shiite Crescent countries: in Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, Azerbaijan and Lebanon.

16. The Frankish Empire

The most famous Frankish ruler Charlemagne increased his power by spreading Christianity. This was sometimes a very bloody affair, for example in the case of the Saxons. In the year 800, the needy Pope Leo III conferred on Charles the title of Roman Emperor, which was still very prestigious at the time. However, Charlemagne’s empire could not be compared to the Roman Empire: it had few navigational canals and was divided by three mountain ranges – the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Vosges. This hindered a flourishing economy. Nevertheless, the unification of the Roman and Germanic peoples and their powerful cooperation eventually led to a united Europe.

17. Pfennig of the Frankish king Charlemagne (768-814), minted after 794 in Milan

The Pfennig was the successor to the Roman denarius. The German word “pfennig” and the English “penny” are the Germanic equivalents of the Latin word “denarius”. The face value on the British copper penny was evidence of this connection until the 20th century. The coinage system of the Frankish empire was centralized, even though a wide supply of coins required many mints. This coin is inscribed “Mediole” for Milan; in the center is Charlemagne’s monogram. The reverse of the coin shows the legend “CARLVS REX FRI” (Charles, King of the Fathers), and a Christian cross. Charlemagne introduced a coinage system in which one pound was equal to 20 shillings, while one shilling was equal to 12 pennies; thus one pound was worth 240 pennies – a system that remained in use in England until the 20th century.

18. Growth in the High Middle Ages

From the middle of the 11th century far-reaching changes began in Europe. They were caused by a rapid growth of the population that continued into the 14th century. This brought about the settlement of new lands, the development of new production techniques and the consequent increase of crops. All this again triggered handwork, trade and the economy.

This era saw the rise of modern states in Western Europe and the ascent of the great Italian city-states. Education came within the reach of wider circles – being able to read and write was no longer the privilege of clerics, but could also be learned by officials and noblemen. Minster and convent schools were founded, the first universities opened. At the same time the papacy and worldly rulers quarreled for supremacy. The height of this power struggle was the so-called Investiture Controversy about the inauguration of clerics. The High Middle Ages were also the time of the Crusades, the first European colonisations. They brought about a blossoming of knighthood, but also new knowledge such as the rediscovery of the writings of Aristotle.

19. The Crusades

The seven medieval wars for sovereignty over Jerusalem were motivated by religion: the tomb of Jesus, Jerusalem and the Holy Land had to be liberated from the rule of the “pagan” Muslims. Behind the religious motive, however, was the assertion of the pope’s political power. He had a chance to achieve world supremacy – at least in the Christian world – if only he succeeded in unifying the Christian peoples in their struggle against Islam. Jerusalem was indeed conquered during the First Crusade (1096-99), but in 1187 it was lost again to the Muslim sultan Saladin. Yet despite this the Crusades showed lasting results, especially in a flourishing Italian trade. The Fourth Crusade (1202-04), financed by Venice, did not focus on Jerusalem any more, but contented itself with razing to the ground Zara, the Venetian conurbation on the Dalmatian coast, and plundering Constantinople.

20. The development of international banking in Italy

The Crusades had numerous effects. While knights from various countries travelled to the Holy Land – whether for the love of adventure or war, or for reasons of piety – the citizens of northern Italian cities saw the chance to trade with the Orient alongside the crusaders. Maritime republics such as Genoa, Pisa or Venice were the first to benefit. Italian trading towns shipped goods from the Levant – the countries of the eastern Mediterranean – further to central Europe. Major trading points were the Champagne fairs. The transaction of their goods in remote areas gave merchants in Genoa, Siena or Florence the idea of ​​introducing the so-called promissory note instead of transporting large amounts of heavy coins: thus money deposited in foreign cities could be deposited with a banker in exchange for a receipt, the promissory note. This note could then be redeemed in many other cities. Thus the international banking system came into being from about 1200. Soon the most widely used international trade coin was the gulden, first issued in Florence in 1252. The gulden was called “fiorino” in Italian, which evolved into “floren” in other languages. This is why the guilder, as the coin was called in the Netherlands, where it circulated until the introduction of the euro in 2002, was abbreviated “FL”.

21. Gold gulden of the Republic of Florence, minted in 1252-1307

The gold coin of the prosperous Italian trading city of Florence weighed 3.5 grams and had a lily flower on its obverse. The coin was called fiorino d’oro in Italian and florin in English because of the fleur de lis (in Latin: flos). The minting of gold coins became possible from 1252 onwards because of the large amounts of gold brought to Italy during the Crusades. Large transactions were much easier with valuable gold coins than with silver ones. The florin thus became one of the major trade coins of the Middle Ages and was imitated in many countries.

22. Grosso of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1197-1250), minted in Bergamo in 1250

The grosso was the first silver coin larger than the double denaro, the highest denomination ever issued in medieval Italy. The name is derived from “grossus denarius”, meaning “thick” or “heavy denarius” or “penny.” Grossi were needed because trade was flourishing in northern Italy in the 12th and 13th centuries. That was why those coins were first issued in the rich Italian trading cities of Genoa and Venice. They were later imitated by many other Italian and northern European cities. In the English language grossi were called groats. This coin, depicting Frederick according to his status as Roman emperor, was equivalent to 6 denarii.

23. Dutch seafaring

The war of independence that the Dutch waged against the Spaniards in the 16th century led to the creation of a strong fleet. Since Spain was vulnerable on all oceans, the struggle for Dutch independence developed into a war in the colonies. The name “New Amsterdam” was used for three settlements and discoveries during the Dutch seafaring of the 16th and 17th centuries: for an island in the Indian Ocean, for a settlement on the South American coast that later became Georgetown, Guyana. And for a Dutch colony on Manhattan Island that became New York under English rule from 1664.

24. Rijdruid of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces, minted in Dordrecht in 1763

Holland was the most important of the seven provinces of the Northern Netherlands. Its economic center was Amsterdam, also called the “Venice of the North”, because the city was built entirely on stilts. In the year 1622, Amsterdam already had 100,000 inhabitants. International trade caused the city to boom, making Amsterdam the first mercantile metropolis of Europe in the 17th century. Both the Dutch East India and Dutch West India Companies had their seats there from 1606. The Gouden Rijders was issued; the gold coin owes its name to the rider design on its obverse. Initially Gouden Rijders were worth 10 to 11 guilders, in 1749 their value was raised to 14 guilders, a rate that remained in effect until 1763.

25. The House of Hapsburg

The House of Hapsburg became the most powerful dynasty of all time through targeted power politics and clever political marriages. From 1438 to 1740, all emperors of the Holy Roman Empire were descendants of the Hapsburgs. In the 16th and 17th centuries, they also ruled the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, and thus over their overseas territories in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. After the death of the last male Hapsburg, Emperor Charles VI, in 1740, Charles daughter Maria Theresa and her husband Francis Stephen of Lorraine founded the dynasty of Hapsburg-Lorraine, which reigned as emperors again from 1765 to the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. The last Roman-German emperor, Francis II, founded the hereditary Austrian Empire, which existed until 1918. Maria Theresa also established a coin that was to gain great importance as a trade coin in Africa and the Levant in the 18th century. This was the so-called Maria Theresa or Levant Taler.

26. Maria Theresa Taler (Revival), 1780, of the Austrian monarch Maria Theresa (1740-1780)

During the succession initiated by Emperor Charles VI in the Pragmatic Sanction, his daughter Maria Theresa followed him on the throne after his abdication in 1740. The regulation led to the War of the Austrian Succession, during which Maria Theresa managed to avoid the imminent partition of her empire. She was highly popular among her subjects, and ruled for 40 years over a realm which at times stretched from the Austrian Netherlands to Transylvania, and from Silesia to Parma. In the government of her multi-ethnic state Maria Theresa showed skills similar to those of her contemporary Catherine the Great of Russia. This Maria Theresa Taler was struck at the mint of Günzburg, an Austrian enclave in today’s Bavaria. The coin depicts the already aging Empress, wearing a widow’s veil with a particularly lavish bust which was probably after the fancy of the Orientals. However, the beauty and the consistency of the coin’s design may have added to its popularity. The Maria Theresa Taler was one of the longest-lasting silver trade coins in monetary history and later always showed the obverse in 1780, the year of Maria Therese’s death.

27. The Circulation of the Maria Theresa Taler

Today’s tiny landlocked State of Austria is hardly considered capable of exerting any influence on other continents. Yet on one side lay the colonial power Spain once ruled by the Hapsburg Kings. And on the other, the port city of Trieste belonged to Austria from 1381 to 1918 (with brief interruptions); Trieste was situated almost as far into the Eastern Mediterranean as Venice. Through the coffee trade the Maria Theresa Taler enjoyed a significant circulation. The need for trade with the East was so great that in 1783 the Austrian Court Chamber ordered that the Taler with the Empress’s image should be minted, even though Maria Theresa had died in 1780.

As late as 1927, more than 15 million talar had been exported from Vienna to Arabia – all bearing the date of 1780. Those talar in Venice, Tuscany and Prussia were already copied in the 18th century. From 1935, they were also produced in Rome, Paris, London and Brussels. To arm troops in East Africa and partisans in Ethiopia, the British also minted the Maria Theresa Talar in Bombay in 1940. Its area of ​​circulation was thus enormous. Arab traders spread the coin throughout the Ottoman Empire, across North Africa, but also as far as the Azores and the centre of Africa, as far as Niger, Chad and Sudan, as well as along the east coast to Zanzibar and Mozambique. In the 20th century, this talar still dominated the money in circulation in the Arabian Peninsula. In Ethiopia the Maria Theresa Talar was the country’s official currency until the Italian occupation in 1936. And the main mint of Vienna sells such talers to this day.

28. The Spanish colonization of America

The Spanish after Christopher Columbus in America could have met an advanced culture with an excellent knowledge of astronomy and mathematics. Yet they preferred to destroy this culture and force the Indians, as they incorrectly called them, to convert to Catholicism. The Aztec empire of Montezuma with its 200,000 warriors was conquered by the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez with only 500 men from 1519 to 1521. Cortez accomplished this conquest with 14 cannons and 24 cavalry, thereby introducing the horse to America. The peso or real de a ocho was the trade coin of early modern times. Its Spanish name (in English: weight) had its origin in the lump of silver of the same weight that the Spanish used as a means of payment in America before the opening of the mints. The coin of 8 tala corresponded roughly to the German taler. Pesos were minted from 1536 in Mexico, the first mint on American soil. With the exploitation of the silver mines of Peru, the issue of pesos took on gigantic dimensions. Between 1537 and 1888, 3 billion pesos are said to have been struck in Mexico alone. The coins, also known as pillar dollars, where circulated all over the world.

29. Doubloon of 8 escudos of the new Spanish viceroy Philip V (1700-1746), minted in Lima in 1737

Since it was forbidden to keep unminted precious metals in the Spanish colonies of the New World, the owners of silver and gold mines minted their metal into raw coins. Those pieces were called pirate or ship pesos, because their images and inscriptions were mostly indistinguishable, and so people believed that they were struck on the silver ships that brought precious metals from America to Europe. These silver fleets always sailed in large groups, for fear of pirates; they sent up to 15 million silver coins to Spain each year. Ship pesos were the most important raw material for the manufacture of coins throughout Europe. Most ship pesos were silver, but some were also gold, as this coin shows. All those coins have in common the relatively careless minting, because they were mass coins.

30. Spread of the Spanish Peso

The Spanish peso, real de a ocho, was issued on a large scale by Charles V as king of Spain. It is said that the name “peso” is derived from the fact that the Spanish used lumps of silver of a certain weight as a means of payment before introducing coins in their American colonies. Those lumps of silver were called pesos. To extract silver from the mountains of Mexico, the first Spanish mint was opened there in 1535. Soon mints were also opened in Lima, Peru and Potosí, Bolivia. The pesos minted there had the Spanish coat of arms or two pillars of Heracles with Charles V’s motto “Plus ultra” (further from above), and between the pillars were two globes with the eastern and western hemispheres respectively.

The peso became the main currency on the entire American continent. In North America it was called the Spanish or Mexican dollar. When the US introduced its first banknotes in 1785, they were equal to the Spanish dollar, and with the Coinage Act of 1792, the Spanish dollar was made the legal tender of the United States. In Canada, after the fall of French rule in 1763, the Spanish dollar was also the most widely used coin. In East Asia, too, the peso was popular and widely used, with the Mexican peso being China’s main trading coin until the 19th century. It was called yuan in Chinese, meaning “round coin.” When the Japanese introduced their own currency in 1871 they adopted the Chinese yuan and converted it to yen.

31. The Napoleonic Empire

Napoleon attempted to establish his power across Europe by using family politics, as if he were a medieval feudal lord. He made his brother Louis Bonaparte king of Holland in 1806, while his brother Joseph became king of Spain. Brother Jerome Bonaparte was given the kingdom of Westphalia in 1807 and sister Marie Caroline Murat-Bonaparte became queen of Naples in 1808. 16 German princes, including the kings of Württemberg and Bavaria, allowed Napoleon to unite them in the Rhine Bund. And when the Continental System against England was not followed – particularly in Holland, Dalmatia and the Papal States – Napoleon declared these territories to be French possessions only.

32. 5 francs of French emperor Napoleon I (1804-1814), minted in 1810

The franc was introduced in 1795 with the French Revolution to bring order to the currency system. Until then the livre was the French monetary system adapted from Charles’ pound and divided into 12 deniers of 20 shillings each. However, the livre tournois suffered depreciation and was thus replaced by the franc, which was divided into 100 centimes. The franc played an important role in the 19th century, for example in the Latin Monetary Union, but was eventually replaced by the English pound.

33. The British Empire

Like the first industrial revolution, England was for many years the leader of imperialism. As a naval power it established its empire in relatively small but strategically important places such as Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, Cape Colony, Singapore, Hong Kong or the Falklands rather than conquering large territories. Since the Pax Romana of ancient times, one can finally speak of a new peacetime, the Pax Britannica, between 1815 and 1914. This was something that neither the papal, German, Spanish nor French attempts at world domination had ever accomplished.

34. Sovereign of the English queen Elizabeth I (1558- 1603), minted about 1583

During the reign of Elizabeth I England, which in those times counted a population of only 4 million inhabitants, grew into a trading and maritime power and began to play an important role on the world political stage. For example, in 1584 the first English colony was founded in America – named Virginia after the unmarried queen – and in 1592 the Levant Trading Company and in 1600 the British East India Company were established. When in 1587 Philip II of Spain used the execution of the Scottish queen Mary Stuart, a Catholic, as a pretext for a war at sea against Elizabeth, with her supposedly invincible Armada, England’s fleet turned out to be superior. Here Elizabeth I is depicted on a sovereign. The coin, which took its name from the portrait of the first ruler enthroned on his obverse, was introduced as early as 1489 under Henry VII. It was originally worth 20 shillings of 12 pence, i.e. it had a value of 240 pence per pound sterling.

35. Sovereign of British King George III (1760-1820), minted in 1817

The Coinage Act of 1816 gave the British coinage system the form in which, thanks to Britain’s role as a world economy, it became the most important world currency system until the beginning of the First World War (1914). Apart from minor changes in design, the British currency system remained stable and unaltered. It was based on a gold coin, the sovereign, which was issued in large quantities. The value of the sovereign corresponded to the former pound. The image showed St George as the dragon slayer, a work of the Italian engraver Benedetto Pistrucci, who was highly regarded at the British court. The motif of St. George remains very popular to this day; it appears on many new English gold coins as well as on the Silver Crown.

36. The Development of the United States

In the eastern part of the United States a flourishing industry existed around 1850, despite strong competition from England. On the other hand, the states in the South still followed traditional production techniques and worked their plantations with colored slaves. It was one of Abraham Lincoln’s goals to free those slaves when he was elected US President in 1861. In the American Civil War between the eastern and southern states that began in the same year and was waged until 1865, other matters became more important. In order to give the state the power to enact common laws, the Union was to be imbued with more power. The industrial states hoped for more protectionism for their goods by the Union. Yet this was against the interests of the southern states and their trade with England. The southern states (the so-called Confederates) thus wanted to be confederated rather than united.

37. United States 20 dollar, minted in Philadelphia in 1908

The United States freed itself from British rule in 1776. A few years later, in 1792, the US introduced a proper currency that differed in many ways from the English pound sterling. The new American coins were called dollars after the German Taler, yet their weight and fineness were modeled on the Spanish-Mexican peso. The dollar sign probably derives from the symbol used for the peso in commercial books of the time: from “8” (for “Real de a Ocho”) to “P8” to $. Until now, the dollar remains the most important world currency. Many currencies were modeled after it, for example those of Canada, Australia or New Zealand. This 20-dollar gold coin from 1908 is a masterpiece, designed by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. It was introduced by President Roosevelt, a great enthusiast of ancient Greek coins, and was in circulation from 1907 to 1933.

38. Economic unity in Europe and the chance for the euro

On the threshold of the third millennium, Europe has an opportunity to reorganise its currency system. The advantages – economic upswing, stronger political and economic cooperation – are obvious. Still, the potential is enormous: the number of people in countries using the euro is larger than the number of US citizens. The euro could thus help the political and economic integration of Europe.

Read Also:

  1. Demerits / Disadvantages Of Money
  2. Money: Concept, Functions and Role
  3. 5 Functions Of Money
  4. Forms Of Money
  5. What Is Money
89590cookie-checkThe History Of Money
Anil Saini

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