To make nets to fish.
I’m surprised that the thread has gotten this far without anybody mentioning human slaves as forms of money and a sign of wealth. Perhaps this is a good sign.
I remember weird money from books and comics I had as a kid:
Yap Island “stone money” has been mentioned (they have one in the Smithsonian), but I think this has been greatly misunderstood and mispromoted by people eager for weird facts – I seriously doubt it was used as money as we consider the term
Cowrie shells and “wampum” (which was also shaped into beads using a drill)
“feather money” in Polynesia (which had to be gathered and formed into rolls)
“Tree Money”, which was really a cetral sprue and cast ingots that were broken off as needed. This was used in several places IIRC, and is just a special form of coinage
Leather “paper money” – used in Germany in the 18th century. I imagine it was used because it was more durable than paper.
At one time or another, I’;ll bet just about anything that can be made into common portable size has been used as a basis for barter. Cigarettes have been used in prisons, armies, and POW camps. SF writer Fredric Brown has a time traveler comment that he’d visited one civilization that used fish scales for money (although I don’t know of any that actually have).
Slaves were certainly a status symbol but they weren’t really used as currency. A single slave was too valuable and stubbornly indivisible into smaller units.
ROTFLMAO. Stubbornly indivisible! Damn those stubborn slaves for not wanting to part with a finger or toe to pay for the their masters bar tab. 
Slaves had value, that’s one thing everyone would agree on. While not indivisible, they did reproduce. Better than a stone wheel, if you ask me.
Chronos’ buds thought Good ‘n’ Plentys had value as trade, even though none of them wanted to eat those delicious treats. What do you want for 'em? Smarties? Reese’s cups? Tootsie rolls?
Is everything that has value considered currency?
Seriously this time . . . I would think not, because the basic concept of currency is that it is used in lieu of barter. Keeps you from having to haggle a deal between the value of your salves and goats verses that piece of land you desire.
Currency is the implementation of the concept “money,” in this case the role of money as a measure of account. Avoiding Econ 400 terms, it’s how you keep score of something’s value.
In fact, fiat money (such as Federal Reserve notes) has no value in and of itself, its sole value is its role as money / currency.
I don’t think slaves make a good currency, or key good. They aren’t fungible, some slaves are very valuable, some slaves are nearly worthless, and some slaves have negative value (although you can mitigate the downside because you can have a negative value slave killed). They aren’t portable, they get upset when they’re sold away from their families. They aren’t divisible, as noted above. They aren’t storable, slaves require food, shelter, overseers, chains, beatings. A typical slave has a very high value, you can’t go down to the store and pick up staples for the week and pay the storekeeper in slaves.
Slaves were considered a store of value and a mark of status. But they didn’t function much like currency, any more than fancy cars, art, large houses, or land function like currency.
To function as currency, or as a key good, the good has to be something you trade often, something you usually aren’t particularly interested in as the good itself, but rather for what other things you can trade for that good.
So among herding societies livestock can act as a form of currency, but usually only for high value trades…bride price, land rights, things like that. You don’t find people buying daily staples and paying in cows, cows are seen as something you accumulate, not something that is supposed to come and go. But cows are seen as pretty interchangable and fungible, they are portable in the sense that you can drive them from one range to another range, while they do have the ability to run away they tend to like to stick with the herd. And cows are a form of capital, they provide milk and blood and burnable fuel, even if you almost never butcher them.
So everything that has value has value, and can be used in an exchange for other items of value. But money is a special form of good. And some goods have qualities that make them more money-like, some goods have qualities that make them less money-like. Fine art, for example, would make poor money, because a Picasso painting and a Lemur866 painting are going to have wildly varying values, and even the Picasso painting doesn’t have a consensus price, the prices Picasso paintings go for at auction can vary wildly depending on all kinds of factors, and there just aren’t that many Picasso paintings around so there isn’t much liquidity. And liquidity is the whole point of money, key goods that act like money are goods that are very liquid.
Oh, and back to the Yap “stone money”. It seems to me these things function more like Pacific Northwest indian “coppers” than like money. They have some of the properties of money, but don’t work very well in that role due to the high value of each individual piece.
My Word Origin Calendar (one of those tear off one page per day things) had a slightly different take on things last week. It states that the salarium was money issued to soldiers so that they could BUY salt.
Another eccentric unit of currency was employed in ancient Sparta: heavy iron bars. They were deliberately made cumbersome to discourage citizens from carrying too much cash around with them.
From the January 1907 Scientific American:
It could be done either way.
Roman soldiers were entitled to a certain amount of salt. They could either be given the salt directly, or the money to buy it. Often, the Roman Army could buy salt in bulk at lower prices, so they paid this in actual salt. Plus at times the Roman government operated its own salt mines, so they just had to transport it to wherever they had the soldiers stationed.
Lots more information in Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky (http://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky/dp/0142001619).
I disagree. Having lived on Yap, I can tell you that the stone money did (definitely before the arrivial of American money) function like money as we preceive it. Even though the money seldom left it’s place on a specific piece of property, it still could be used to buy things. In each clan there is a man whose job it is to keep track of just who owns which piece of stone money and how much of it is owned by that family.
It still is used as money to a somewhat lesser extent.
Periodically the men in charge get together and work out any specific disagreements. These are few since every transaction is carefully monitored by vertually everyone in the clan and often neighboring clans.
If you owned one of the stones you could get change for it in American dollars, Japanese Yen or whatever at the local bank, the Yap branch of the Bank of Hawaii.
The bank, in fact, has two of the larger ones and (if I remember correctly) one of the smaller ones. The smaller ones are worth markedly more, since it took more courage to get them.
Since the coming of the American dollar, one doesn’t have to keep track of each purchase quite so much since one can purchase without having to check the books just who has that piece of the pie.
A side note here. Many of the Yappese are still upset with the Smithsonian. They were under the impression that the stone “coin” they have was just going to Washington D.C. to show the people what it was. They expected it to be returned in short measure. Despite that it is still being used as money.
Weren’t Ostrich feathers used as money in South Africa briefly. I seem to remember somone mentioning tuilips as currancy for the Netherlands.
The tulip bulb mania gets a good treatment in “Extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds” - it wasn’t really a currency (they were far too dear) but a speculation that makes even the dot.com mania look sensible.
The book is available online, free:
Here’s one to warm the cockles of many a doper’s heart - rum. In early Australian colonial history (within a quarter century or so of English settlement), a barter economy emerged in which rum became for a time the medium of exchange. The military regiment raised to police the colony and its convicts became known as the Rum Corps - they were hopelessly corrupt, and controlled the production and distribution of the product.
Eventually, Governor Bligh (yes, Bligh of the Bounty) came to be in charge. He trod on sufficient toes in dealing with the matter that he was subjected to a second mutiny (known to history as the “Rum Rebellion”). (Although I should say that there is dispute about the relative significance of the rum issue amongst all the other issues contributing to the revolt).
Eventually, a soldier named Macarthur was appointed governor who was a competent administrator, and the use of rum for currency disappeared in Australia. Except, like everywhere else, on Friday nights at various sleezy dives where it is used in the endless pursuit of female sexual acquiescence. Not that I have ever done that, of course…
TV Time writes:
Well, I yield to the gentleman from Yap. My statement was based on past experience with hyperbole, and things I’d heard.
Nevertheless,. I find it very hard to believe that the Yap island stone disks work “just like money”. It’s too damned big, and there’s too little of it. You can’t exactly use it for small purchases. If you say that it stays in one place, gets moved rarely, and gets borrowed against, then I say it acts like a form of collateral (like a building, or a valuable painting or something). That’s neither barter nor money.
During the Civil War, postage stamps were used as currency by the conferedacy. There were even little round holders with a clear side to show the value of the stamp. This turned it into a de facto coin.
Hypno-Toad’s stamps reminds me, that I had heard that in some South American country, during a period of runaway inflation, bus tokens came to be a de facto currency. You could never tell what one of the pesos would buy tomorrow, but you knew that tomorrow one token would entitle you to one ride on the bus.
Tobacco was used as money during the 1700’s in America.
There is a tobacco shop in Chicago which used to have (it wasn’t there last time I was in) what they claimed was the last existing sample of tobacco money. The sign said that it was found in George Washington’s campaign chest years after the Revolution.