Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Coins to Credit Cards, a Short History of Money: Neil MacGregor

(This is an excerpt from Neil MacGregor’s new book, “A History of the World in 100 Objects,” just published by Penguin.)

Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) -- We’ve all grown so accustomed to using little round pieces of metal to buy things, it’s easy to forget that coins arrived quite late in the history of the world. For more than 2,000 years, states ran complex economies and international-trading networks without a coin to hand.

The Egyptians, for example, used a sophisticated system that measured value against standard weights of copper and gold. But as new states and new ways of organizing trade emerged about 3,000 years ago, coinage began to make an appearance. Paper money would not arrive for another couple of millenniums and credit cards, not until the 20th century.

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