Web of Wealth

In his paper "In search of the eternal coin - a long finance view of history", Dr Malcolm Cooper has written a history of the eternal coin. The eternal coin is an imaginary construct (Cooper calls it a thought experiment), so it's a curious kind of history, retelling the past through the lens of an imagined future. Cooper singles out a number of historical vignettes, which display different elements of a system of value. As I see it, these vignettes can be grouped into four types of economic system, which correspond roughly to the four types of trust identified in Aidan and John's book. Hierarchical Authority. This is exemplified by the ancient empires of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China (Ozymandias), and by the Feudal systems of Northern Europe (Domesday). The ancients believed that material wealth accumulated in this world could be carried into the next world. Mediaeval kings and barons donated substantial proportions of their material wealth to the Church, in the belief that this would produce favours in the next world. Commodity. The Industrial Revolution establishes factories for the production of commodities. Economic activity starts to be focused on the production of commodities, rather than the production of an agricultural surplus. An important transition point is the Confederate system, in which the coinage is explicitly linked to cotton futures. Network. The Roman Empire is the first economic trading system identified by Cooper in which coinage is widely used for the purpose of trade. This system is echoed by the guild system of the late middle ages. Globalization gradually increased, from the emergence of banking and the invention of the telegraph. The point here is that wealth increasingly comes from the activity of trading itself, rather than any particular goods and services being traded. Mutual Aid. The final type of economy might be the kind of system advocated by Kropotkin, which has perhaps never actually existed. Alternatively, we might look at a romanticized notion of primitive man (such as American Indians) living at one with nature.