Money in the Dutch Republic
Everyday Practice and Circuits of Exchange

Offers a distinctive history of money as an everyday social technology in the Dutch Republic from 1600 to 1850.

Sebastian Felten (Author)

9781009098847, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 10 March 2022

290 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.7 cm, 0.5 kg

'Felten utilizes a variety of disciplines and sources, providing an intriguing, accessible, and erudite analysis into the use of money. He illustrates exchange mechanisms that linked rural areas to urban centers and ultimately to global networks. Money in the Dutch Republic possesses a Braudelian feel for both local details and big structures.' Charles Parker, Saint Louis University

The Dutch Republic was an important hub in the early modern world-economy, a place where hundreds of monies were used alongside each other. Sebastian Felten explores regional, European and global circuits of exchange by analysing everyday practices in Dutch cities and villages in the period 1600-1850. He reveals how for peasants and craftsmen, stewards and churchmen, merchants and metallurgists, money was an everyday social technology that helped them to carve out a livelihood. With vivid examples of accounting and assaying practices, Felten offers a key to understanding the internal logic of early modern money. This book uses new archival evidence and an approach informed by the history of technology to show how plural currencies gave early modern users considerable agency. It explores how the move to uniform national currency limited this agency in the nineteenth century and thus helps us make sense of the new plurality of payments systems today.

1. Money as social technology
2. Grain money in a farming community
3. Ink money in a princely estate
4. Metallurgy and the making of intrinsic value
5. Mercantile practice and everyday use
6. Patriotic economics and the making of a national currency
Conclusion
Appendix
Notes
Archival Sources
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of engineering & technology [TBX], History of science [PDX], Economic history [KCZ], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL]