Barter
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Banking basics
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Barter
(n., v.)
In the absence of a common framework for exchange of abstract value, the exchange of one good or service for another.
In a particularly entertaining passage is particularly entertaining book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, the late David Graeber addresses the commonplace wisdom that fiat currency grew out of a system of barter between “savages”.
Not only is the necessary widespread “double coincidence” of needs — you want loaves, which I happen to bake, and I happen to want barrels, which you happen to make[1] — that barter implies implausible, says Graeber but, according to the anthropological record (and he was an anthropologist, so well placed to know) there almost no evidence that it happened, at least not within communities with any level of trust or familiarity. The idea that money grew from barter is imaginary, the product of the colourful metaphors of Aristotle, Adam Smith and others.
Where there is evidence of barter was between strangers, and groups between whom trust was low: rival tribes in Papua New Guinean rainforests, shiploads of Her Majesty’s finest colonial oppressors, trading rifles, blankets and influenza for sweet potato, flightless birds and sovereignty.
Money being a only of any use within a community of trust — I say this on. The hoof, but it is hard to see anyone accepting a promissory token in any other circumstances — this presentation of barter as a useful component of a trustless system rather rules it out of play when it comes to the genealogy of money.
See also
- ↑ This strikes me as a single coincidence, but still.