Starting out people would have been using pure socialism. There was no need for barter or money, all resources were pooled. At some point people begin to specialize and the community diversifies and there’s a need for establishing a means of fair exchange. When there are just two parties in a transaction there’s no need for money or any more bartering than a direct trade, I give you a piece of venison, and you give me a basket of fruit.
As the community gets larger and people become more specialized the direct trades become unworkable. I have a piece of venison and I want a new pointy stick. You have a basket of fruit and you want a leather belt. Ook has an extra pointy stick and he wants a basket of fruit. Thag has a leather belt and he wants a piece of venison.
We can either find a way to get all four of us together and hand across the items we are trying to obtain, or we can use an exchange medium. Even if I give you the venison and you go see the others and bring me back the pointy stick we are using a promise as the medium of exchange. That’s the same as modern money except for the symbolic token. We could scratch a picture of Og onto some clam shells and all agree each one is a promise for something of the same value as a pointy stick, basket of fruit, piece of venison, or leather belt, or we could find some shiny rocks that do have that actual value, but whether it’s a promise, a token, or another item of value, we are using money rather than bartering.
Bartering is too inefficient for a real economy of size and diversity.
I have to start by stating that I have not read Graeber’s book. At 542 pages, this thread will be abandoned long before I could do so.
I don’t find it credible that there was never a barter economy. Certainly within one’s small group of hunter-gatherers, a sharing economy was likely. But there is evidence of trade over long distances at time periods well before the formal adoption of any kind of currency. What do you do when a stranger shows up with a pack mule laden with better flint than you can find locally? Do you demand that he give you some on credit? Or do you exchange some of the turquoise your people are using for decoration? Conversely, are you going to just give him stuff in the hope that next time he comes around he will bring you something? I really don’t think so. I think you haggle back and forth until you reach an agreement on how much turquoise is worth how much flint. And if you are able to communicate at that level, you maybe agree to make a similar trade next year when he comes around again.
Over time, a large number of transactions like this over a widespread area would probably have led to common agreement about the relative worth of things. At this point you start to see the glimmer of the idea of currency. Currency itself, in the form of coins, did not come into being until around 600 BC IIRC.
As an intermediate, some sort of standardised system of value must have existed. But it had to be based on something of recognized value. Seashells would not have sufficed.
This is my personal theory, as I’ve never seen it elsewhere, but I believe that the bronze tripods everybody was swapping back and forth like holiday fruitcakes in Homer represent such a standardized value.
Bronze itself is valuable as you can use it to make tools and weapons. Tripods also are of value for things like cooking when you are away from home, keeping perishable goods out of the reach of small animals, etc. But would you really want them made of bronze? Such would be unnecessarily heavy to lug around when you are traveling or on campaign. Wooden tripods would function better for practical purposes. So, a bronze tripod was symbolic of something. Perhaps a bronze tripod represented enough bronze to make a suit of armor and a sword. It is easy to see how that would have been a useful standard in those days.
Now that you have the idea that a standard of exchange is based on a useful/valuable metal it is just a fairly small mental leap to break that tripod up into much smaller units and make coins which could be used for much smaller transactions.
Here are my layman’s gleanings. I hope experts will comment.
My impression is that Neolithic man had three main transaction modes: sharing within a community (band, clan or village); gifts, tributes or debts to external communities; and barter. Barter might have been the least important but was surely present: I read an article about bartering in some other primate species. (Memory is fuzzy; perhaps it was chimpanzees and the only specific transactions attested were male-to-female gifts in return for sexual favors.)
Yes, surely most comminities were communist or authoritarian. I don’t know about trading debts between communities, but imagine large gifts or trades were often made with minimal explicit negotiation.
By the Bronze Age, some civilizations were using coins as money. I think this is attested in Harrapan cilivization, but perhaps not in Egypt(?). (What about Sumeria?)
But it’s not just about the immediate expectation of reciprocation. Tribes often give each other enormously valuable gifts of throw incredibly costly feasts for the same reason a big-shot insists on paying for the meal at a restaurant. To let everyone know how powerful and awesome they are. Much of the time, everyone would be significantly better off materially if they agreed to just stopped doing this altogether.
"Ug thinks he’s so great giving my tribe all that flint. He knows that it would be a great insult to turn away the offer. Well I’ll show him! I’m gonna send him so much turquoise!’
My Dad grew up with a Eskimo tribe (My Grandparents were sent to teach them), and he said that yes, when one hunter had a excess it was certainly shared with the other, less fortunate members. But even at a basic hunter level, there are more things than just food- and certainly some tribe members were better off than the others, so it wasn’t communistic- perhaps socialistic. Luxuries would not necessarily be shared.
So I think the idea is wrong. Long before complex bartering or “money” there was simple “this for that” trading. Kids do this all the time. Now, perhaps we are misunderstanding Graeber in that he just passes over simple trading, to him “bartering” is the rather complex IOU system some peoples have. In that case, yes, i can well believe that some sort of “money” came before complex bartering.
Aztec society was basically a pre-currency economy with a widespread trade network and a dedicated merchant class. While it wasn’t all strictly bartering, in the sense that there were established trade goods as well (cocoa and cotton cloth), it certainly wasn’t as if these were preceded by actual currency.
That is certainly true. The potlatch system of the Algonqian peoples is well attested to.
But that doesn’t work with trade over long distances. If I want something that is only found or produced hundreds or even thousands of miles away, I have to either go there with something valuable to exchange for the item I want, or I have to depend on a middleman to do that traveling. The prestige of giving won’t get the job done.
Let’s bring it back to the original question: Did currency predate barter? This is Graeber’s claim. What evidence does he have that it is true?
We know that people were recording transactions with clay tokens for 3000 years before the first coins appeared. They were even doing so 2000 years before the first standardized metal ingots appeared. We know that these transactions involved counts of commodities: 50 sheep, 10 bushels of grain, 2 oxen. We know that the numbering systems used to represent different commodities varied. There was a symbol for 50 sheep – there wasn’t a symbol for 50. None of the hundreds of accounting records that survive from ancient Mesopotamia make any reference to a shared unit of value – a currency – they’re just lists of commodities with counts.
So, what is Graeber’s evidence for a currency existing before the 2nd millenium BCE?
Sure, it’s *possible *that some sort of ephemeral currency existed and all evidence for it have now vanished. But is it really plausible that none of the many accounting records that have survived from that time make any mention of it? No scribe ever noted “Oh, in addition to the 50 sheep and 10 bushels of grain, the king also wants you to give him 40 quatloos.”
It could take any form : silex blades, for instance. Or sheeps in a herder society. They’re goods, but they can be used as money. I really don’t need sheep but I’ll nevertheless take three of yours in payment for whatever I gave you. How exactly can we tell what qualifies as barter and what qualifies as money use, if it involves valuable goods, being sheep, silex blades or salt? The difference between bartering and using money seems blurry to me.
Also, I’d guess that “owed favours” and “gifts” (made with the expectation that the other party will make gifts back someday) could be a form of trade.
Finally, it seems to me that early Egyptians didn’t have any currency when they already have a writing system. Is it known how they exchanged goods? For instance how you would proceed to get some beer from a brewer?
Do we have many accounting records ? Those are only from one part of the world, over a certain time frame.
We’ve got human societies going back tens of thousands of years globally. Human burials in Australia dating 50,000 years ago, and buried with grave goods too. The oldest marking known is, I believe, is an engraved piece of ochre from Blombos Cave S.A. 70,000 years old and they have evidence of ochre use going back 100,000 years. People have been doing stuff for a long time.
Best of all there are shell beads from Blombos cave from 75,000 years ago, and shells are famous for their use as money too.
So, “Ok you can have these shell beads, maybe give me something next time you go fishing, see how it goes eh ?”
I think the basic premise here is being misinterpreted.
At one time when we lived in small groups, there was a gift economy. People shared what they produced, as basically a large family. There was a sense of reciprocity, but this was maintained through bestowing or denying honor.
Here is were the views diverge.
According to one view, people began to formally barter things. Then some time later they developed a means of exchange to make it more useful.
According to the other view, people began to expect things- they began to quantify the “gifts” that they were owed. This eventually led to the development of money, which made it easier to pay those debts.
In other words, people isn’t qualify exchange until they started to quantify what they were owed.
That still sounds like barter thinking. Before you have money, how can you quantify debts, except by analogy with other material exchanges you’ve seen?
Money is fundamentally a belief system. A dollar bill is just a piece of paper with ink on it. A clay tablet with some symbols on it is nothing more than dirt. Money only works if everyone involved is part of a belief system whereby something with no intrinsic value represents something that does have intrinsic value.
So how do you convince someone from another tribe, that doesn’t speak your language to believe that someone of no intrinsic value is equivalent to something that does have intrinsic value?
Why should I give you my buffalo hide for nothing more than a promise? Especially since you dress funny and don’t know how to speak like a proper human being.
You would give me your hide because you trust me. Just as you trust the government to honour that dollar bill. Now, I will have earned that trust in some way (maybe I left a hostage) but now that you do trust me I will take your hides to my tribe and swap them for something you want.
Of course, it’s more likely to be the other way around - my tribe trust me (because they know me) and send me off with the goods, expecting me to return with buffalo hides. You don’t have to trust me because we are doing a straight swap.
The problem with using shells or anything else that can be gathered, is simply that. If money (dollar bills for example) really did grow on trees, it would be completely worthless. Maybe if the shells were a finite resource which means that there are only a fixed number in circulation, they could become a currency.
The problem with this argument is you’re saying essentially:
people first developed monetary systems that did not require math or writing
people forgot about this monetary system and reverted to barter
people developed math and writing, recording their barter practices in detail
people re-invented monetary exchanges, but it took 1000 years
Reading over the whole thread, the only contention that makes any sense to me is that barter was not simultaneous. You didn’t show up to market with three sheep at the same time I showed up a bushel of apples. Instead, you probably gave me three sheep in the spring and I paid you back with a bushel of apples in the fall.
So, while that scenario establishes that credit/lending may predate money, we still have it built on non-monetary barter. Our futures contract for apples cannot be converted to a value in wheat or labor without a new bartering transaction. Maybe some people were even that sophisticated. The shepherd could transfer my fall apple obligation to you in exchange for wheat this summer. Still no money, though.
