A Chronology of Money

This chronology does not attempt to reduce the history of money to a linear sequence. Many turning points were slow, local, disputed; many dates indicate useful conventions more than absolute beginnings. The entries follow the arc of the book: from recorded debt to code, from money as social measure to money as global infrastructure. For the long history of money the general reference is Davies [Davies 2002]; for modern international monetary regimes Eichengreen [Eichengreen 2008]; for crises, defaults and sovereign debt Reinhart and Rogoff [Reinhart & Rogoff 2009].

Antiquity

• ~3rd millennium BCE — Debt records in Mesopotamia. Temples and palaces use clay tablets to record obligations in barley, silver and labour. Money appears first as a unit of account and memory of debt, not as coined money.

• ~3rd-2nd millennium BCE — Barley and silver as measures of value. In Mesopotamia some commodities function as accounting references: barley for ordinary payments, silver for more abstract and transferable valuations.

• ~2nd millennium BCE — Interest and remissions. Interest-bearing credit is attested long before coined money. Periodic debt cancellation becomes a political instrument to prevent obligation from destroying the social body.

• ~7th century BCE — First electrum coins in Asia Minor. In Lydia and nearby areas, standardised and marked pieces of metal appear. The seal of authority transfers trust from weight verified case by case to a recognised mark.

• ~6th century BCE — Croesus and gold and silver coinage. The figure of Croesus, intertwined with legend, remains associated with monetary wealth and with a clearer separation between gold and silver coins.

• ~6th-5th century BCE — Money enters the Greek polis. Greek cities imprint civic symbols on coins. Money becomes a political fact: measure of value, sign of identity, instrument of public payment.

• ~5th-4th century BCE — Mercenaries, tributes and the monetisation of war. Metallic money facilitates the payment of soldiers and the transfer of resources between distant territories. War accelerates monetary circulation.

• c. 211 BCE — Reform of the Roman denarius. Rome consolidates a silver coinage with a long history ahead of it. Money becomes one of the material instruments of imperial expansion.

• 1st-3rd century CE — The emperor’s face on money. Roman money spreads images, titles and messages of power. Every payment carries imperial propaganda with it.

• 3rd century CE — Debasements and Roman monetary crisis. The reduction of the metallic content of some coins accompanies fiscal and military pressures. Ancient inflation is a long process, not a single collapse.

• 301 CE — Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices. Imperial authority attempts to control maximum prices and wages. The episode shows the limits of political command when monetary trust is already compromised.

Middle Ages and Renaissance

• ~8th-9th century — Carolingian reforms and the centrality of silver money. Medieval European coinage reorganises around silver units, in an economy less monetised but not without credit and obligations.

• 11th-13th century — European commercial revival. Cities, fairs and trade routes multiply the need for payment and credit instruments more flexible than physically transported metal.

• 12th-13th century — Fairs of Champagne. The fairs connect European merchants and favour clearings, exchanges and credit. Money often moves as writing before it moves as metal.

• 12th-14th century — Bills of exchange. The transfer of value between distant centres becomes possible through documents and networks of trust. Exchange between currencies often also conceals remuneration of credit.

• 12th-13th century — The Templars as a network of custody and transfer. The order offers financial services tied to pilgrimages and sovereign powers. Its later history will be wrapped in myths disproportionate to the documented facts.

• 1307-1312 — Arrest and suppression of the Templars. The destruction of the order recalls that international finance remains exposed to political power and to the violence of the debtor sovereign.

• 12th-14th century — Forced loans and civic monti. Venice, Genoa and other Italian cities develop forms of public debt. The urban state finances present expenditure by selling future promises to citizens.

• 1397 — Foundation of the Medici Bank. The Medici network shows the Renaissance bank as an infrastructure of credit, information and political power.

• 1407 — Bank of Saint George in Genoa. The Genoese institution administers shares of public debt and fiscal functions. The boundary between private finance and city government becomes porous.

• 1494 — Luca Pacioli publishes the Summa. Double-entry bookkeeping, already practised by merchants, is codified and made transmissible. The firm learns to read itself through its account books.

• 1519 — The Fuggers finance the election of Charles V. Private credit enters the heart of imperial politics. The banker does not mint money, but can make possible the power of those who control it.

The Age of Empires and Silver

• c. 1492-1500 — Iberian expansion in the Atlantic. The European conquest of the Americas opens a new global cycle of precious metals, colonial violence and monetary integration.

• 1497 — Spanish monetary reform and the fortune of the piece of eight. The Spanish silver coin will in time become a de facto world currency, accepted far beyond the borders of the monarchy that issues it.

• 1545 — European discovery of the Cerro Rico of Potosí. The mountain of silver becomes one of the tragic centres of the global economy: monetary wealth for Europe, forced labour and devastation for local populations.

• 1565 — Manila-Acapulco route. The Manila galleon connects America, Asia and Europe. American silver feeds Chinese demand and makes monetary circulation planetary.

• 16th century — Price Revolution. Europe experiences a long rise in prices. The inflow of precious metals matters, but the causes are debated and include demography, war, trade and institutions.

• c. 1568 — Jean Bodin discusses money and prices. Reflection on the relationship between quantity of money and prices takes shape in the European debate, anticipating intuitions of the quantity theory.

• 16th-17th century — Spanish paradox. Spain receives enormous flows of metal, but does not build lasting prosperity. Money can pass through a state without making it more solid.

• 1602 — Dutch East India Company. The VOC consolidates the joint-stock company on an imperial scale and makes shares of capital negotiable. Modern finance intertwines with colonial expansion.

• 1609 — Bank of Amsterdam. The bank offers a reliable money of account in a world of heterogeneous metallic coins. Accounting stability becomes a public service for trade.

Paper, Banks and Gold

• 1636-1637 — Dutch tulip mania. The tulip bubble will become a financial myth much larger than the documented episode. It is a reminder of the narrative force of manias.

• 1694 — Foundation of the Bank of England. A loan to a sovereign at war generates an institution destined to become the model of the central bank. Public debt and bank money grow together.

• 1716-1720 — John Law’s system in France. Paper money, bank and colonial promise merge in a great experiment. The collapse shows how rapidly paper trust can evaporate.

• 1720 — South Sea Bubble. Speculation on the South Sea Company overwhelms English finance. The bubble accelerates the debate on regulation, credit and fraud.

• 1797 — Bank Restriction Act. The Bank of England suspends convertibility into gold during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Paper can survive without conversion, if trust holds.

• 1816 — Britain formalises the gold standard. Gold becomes the pivot of the British monetary system and, progressively, the reference of the nineteenth-century international monetary order.

• 1870s-1914 — Classical gold standard. The main economies anchor their currencies to gold. The system favours exchange-rate stability and trade, but imposes socially painful adjustments.

• 1914 — The First World War breaks the order of gold. Convertibility is suspended in many countries. War shows that, when state survival is at stake, the discipline of gold can be abandoned.

• 1925 — Britain returns to gold. The return to the old parity, criticised by Keynes, imposes deflationary costs. Gold appears at once moral duty and political constraint.

• 1929 — Wall Street crash. The stock-market panic opens the Great Depression. The crisis reveals the interaction between leverage, bank panic and monetary rigidity.

• 1931 — Britain leaves gold. The British departure marks a symbolic break in the nineteenth-century order. Those who abandon the golden constraint earlier tend to recover earlier.

• 1933-1934 — The United States breaks the domestic link with gold. Roosevelt suspends domestic convertibility and redefines the price of gold. The national currency becomes more openly an instrument of economic policy.

• 1944 — Bretton Woods. The dollar becomes convertible into gold for monetary authorities; other currencies anchor to the dollar. It is a compromise between discipline and political management.

The Fiat Century

• 15 August 1971 — Nixon suspends dollar convertibility into gold. The gold window closes. For the first time the world monetary system rests entirely on fiat currencies.

• 1973 — Flexible exchange rates among the main currencies. The world enters the age of floating. The external value of money becomes a market price and an object of policy.

• 1970s — Great Inflation and stagflation. Oil shocks, expectations, monetary policies and distributive conflicts produce high inflation. The explanations remain debated.

• 1979-1982 — Volcker tightening. The Federal Reserve raises rates sharply to break inflation. Price stability is regained at the cost of recession and unemployment.

• 1980s — Latin American debt crisis. The cycle of international credit reverses. Countries that had borrowed in the easy times discover the political cost of impossible refinancing.

• 1987 — Black Monday. The crash of equity markets recalls that computerised finance can propagate panic with new speed, even without producing a general depression.

• 1997-1998 — Asian crisis and Russian default. Mobile capital, foreign-currency debt and international trust produce regional crises and global contagion.

• 1999 — The euro is born as book-entry money. The European single currency enters markets and accounts before banknotes. It is a currency without a full federal state, sustained by common institutions.

• 2002 — Euro banknotes and coins. The euro becomes a physical daily experience for millions of citizens. The change of medium makes a political and monetary choice tangible.

• 2007-2008 — Global financial crisis. The housing bubble and the securitisation of risk end in systemic panic. Central banks become the final barrier of the system.

• 2010-2012 — European sovereign debt crisis. The banking crisis turns into a crisis of states and of the euro. The dilemma between austerity, solidarity and monetary sovereignty becomes central.

The Digital Age

• 31 October 2008 — Bitcoin white paper. Satoshi Nakamoto proposes a peer-to-peer electronic cash system without a trusted financial intermediary [Nakamoto 2008] .

• 3 January 2009 — Bitcoin genesis block. The Bitcoin network begins to function. The distributed ledger becomes a real monetary experiment, not only a technical document.

• 2010s — Mobile payments and platforms. Smartphones, apps and digital networks transform the everyday experience of money. In some countries the phone anticipates or replaces the traditional bank account; the Global Findex 2025 shows how tightly financial access, mobile phones and digital services are now intertwined [Klapper et al. 2025] .

• 2010s — Cryptocurrencies, exchanges and new intermediation. Around the decentralised ideal, centralised exchange and custody platforms arise. The protocol without a centre generates new gateways with a centre.

• 2019 — Stablecoins enter the global monetary debate. Private projects for stable digital money push governments and central banks to question sovereignty, payments and regulation.

• 2020-2023 — Acceleration of digital payments. The pandemic and the growth of e-commerce strengthen non-physical payment habits. Cash remains, but loses centrality in many economies.

• 2020s — CBDCs in research and experimentation. Many central banks study retail or wholesale digital currencies. Public money seeks a digital form compatible with modern payments [BIS 2021] [Illes et al. 2025] .

• 2020s — Tokenisation and programmable registers. Securities, deposits and financial assets are rethought as digital objects transferable on programmable platforms. The promise is efficiency; the risk is new infrastructural concentration [BIS 2025] .

• 2020s — De-dollarisation as an open debate. Some states seek partial alternatives to the dollar in reserves and payments. Diversification advances slowly, but the dollar remains the pivot of the system [IMF 2026] [Federal Reserve 2025] .

• 2020s — Elevated global debt. States and private actors enter the digital age with great accumulated promises. The future of money remains tied to the future of debt [IMF 2026] [IMF 2025] .

• Ongoing — Programmable money and privacy. The decisive question is not only which technology will prevail, but what political limits will regulate data, surveillance, monetary inclusion and exclusion.