The Silver Empire: How Germany Created Its First Common Currency. By Oliver Volckart. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. Pp. 384. $39.99, hardcover.
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: Much ink has been spilled on the gold standard as the first truly international monetary regime (1870s-1914).Perhaps blinded by the benefit of hindsight, a generation of scholars sought to explain the process as an almost preordained happening, a natural course of events, either because of the innate deficiencies of bimetallism and the silver standard or because of the perceived benefits that a common gold standard promised.Recently, a revisionist strand has taken issue with this view.Notably, Flandreau (2000, 2004), following Milton Friedman's remarks (1990), has demonstrated that bimetallism was not the "knife-edge" as many contemporaries depicted it.On the contrary, because of France's critical mass in the world's monetary geography, it worked remarkably well.It must be understood as the single factor in stabilizing the gold-silver parity before the 1870s.In my research (Schiltz 2020), I have taken this argument beyond the contours of the European and North American continents and explained how exchange banking practice-in particular, the innovation of setting off equal amounts of trade contracts denominated in different metals against each other, thus hedging exchange risk-absorbed pressure to engage in costly monetary reform and thus delayed adoption of the gold (exchange) standard in the periphery.Silver was, in other words, for a long time an indispensable ingredient in international finance, if not for sovereign debt, then certainly for trade finance-which in turn may explain why it took so long to be overtaken by gold.These debates do, however, not explain how the nineteenth century got there in the first place.Why and how did hybrid and highly fragmented monetary systems persist for such a long time?How did, for instance, the Holy Roman Empire fare with its diffuse monetary system (if we can call it a system at all)?How did it go about trying to alleviate the very real pressures of monetary mayhem?We should count ourselves lucky to have a historian of Oliver Volckart's caliber to take it upon himself to explore these questions.Writing about events pre-1800 is no sinecure.Because of a host of largely interrelated technological conditions (related to matters of transportation, communication, assaying, administration, etc.) and the difficulties for a twenty-first-century public to imagine their ramifications, we have to tread carefully.In the following paragraphs, we will see how the book makes its case.Chapter 1 outlines the culprit for the Empire's monetary travails: a rampant trade in coinage among the empire's regions.What happened was as follows: wealthy merchants purchased large amounts of coins struck in a particular estate, which they shipped and sold to the authorities of another estate or, directly, to their respective mints.There, the money was broken, the alloy mixed with base metal, and new coins struck, which were shipped back to the estate where the money had been purchased in the first place.Interestingly, this was not the same thing as counterfeiting, although even contemporaries sometimes misunderstood it as such.Instead, the practice was directly related to the byzantine administrative set-up of the Empire.Volckart explains (p.22): "Looked at from a modern perspective, early sixteenth century Germany barely resembles what we would call a state.It had no capital where the central government had its seat; in fact, it did not have a central government worthy of that name in the first place.It did not even have any clearly defined borders.[...].What Germany had were pretensions."Indeed, the only thing lending any sense of unity in the empire was (feudal) law: mountains of
Source: The Journal of Economic History
Author: Michael Schiltz
Institution: Hokkaido University
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4404692146