Monetary Unification in the Ancient World
By Teresa Caruso
Nations and Nationalities in Historical Perspective, edited by Gudmunður Hálfdanarson and Ann Katherine Isaacs (Edizioni Plus, 2001)
Introduction: The choice of a numismatic subject suitable for a volume centred around the formation of a common European culture and its relationship – both positive and negative – with previous civilizations and state organisations and systems, was suggested by the Euro, the common currency destined to almost completely unify the monetary circulation of Europe in the course of 2002.
“If civilization were to give a single currency to all men on earth, an important step would have been taken in convincing them that they belong to one species”. This phrase, taken from an 1865 issue of The Economist, is the introduction to a slim volume which aims at explaining to the Italians the advantages of a single monetary unit and to help them overcome the inevitable discomforts due to its substitution for the old national lira. A single currency eliminates the complexity and costs of monetary conversions and the risks of exchange, facilitates knowledge of the real prices of goods, movement of individuals, and also the life of a company, with reduction of dangers and costs of transactions and of financing. The advantages of a unified currency are beyond doubt, in both public and private domains; nevertheless this goal was attained with great difficulty, requiring years of study, experimentation and numerous negotiations. In fact, the operative bases for putting the unification project into practice proposed in 1969 at the summit conference of The Hague, have been defined only recently in 1992 with the Maastricht Treaty; and, finally in 1998, at the beginning of May, the last organizational problems were laboriously resolved. Within a few months many of our countries will have completed the transition to the Euro.
The wariness of both individuals and governments, however, is not completely allayed. This derives from motives of gain, for example that of the closed and sometimes selfish national economies, or from the technical and practical difficulties that necessitate a fixed exchange between the currencies involved during the period of gradual substitution. And there is the inevitable stubborn resistance of individuals to abandoning spontaneous and almost instinctive ways of calculating in everyday use and in familiar denominations, to master new ones. At any rate, I do not believe that one can exclude the participation of other factors. It is not possible to establish direct comparisons between the ancient and modern monetary systems. Coinage has undergone too many changes due to various factors – political, institutional, social, administrative, commercial, economic, cultural – which have acted separately, together or in groups, and have modified it in both form and substance, in time and space, while rendering it ever more indispensable to man’s life. Attempts at unification and actual unifications of currency occurred also in antiquity. Therefore I hope that the situations, ways and motives for which areas of unified currency in the ancient Mediterranean cultures were attempted or realized, providing the roots of today’s European reality, will provoke at least curiosity the reader.
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