Money in the Pre-Industrial World

'John Munro is the ultimate authority for economists worried about the debasement puzzle, or how to compare prices from Roman times to the present or across the world from India to Mexico. Here he presents authorities who cover a wide range of early solutions to the "big problem of small change." ' Larry Neal, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 'This book can be thoroughly recommended to anybody interested in the subject.' -- Martin Allen EH.net

• Introduction, John H. Munro; Chapter 1 The Technology and Economics of Coinage Debasements in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: With Special Reference to the Low Countries and England, John H. Munro; Chapter 2 From Aurelian to Diocletian: Financing Imperial Recovery by Coinage Debasements and Fiduciary Currencies, Kenneth W. Harl; Chapter 3 The Making of a Gold Standard: The Ducat and Its Offspring, 1284-2001, Alan Stahl; Chapter 4 Debasement of the Coinage and Its Effects on Exchange Rates and the Economy: In England in the 1540s, and in the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands in the 1480s, Peter Spufford; Chapter 5 The Amsterdam Wisselbank's Innovations in the Monetary Sphere: The Role of 'Bank Money', Herman Van der Wee; Chapter 6 Silver in England 1600-1800: Coinage Outputs and Bullion Exports from the Records of the London Tower Mint and the London Company of Goldsmiths, Nicholas J. Mayhew; Chapter 7 The Burdens of Tradition: Debasements, Coinage Circulation and Mercantilist Public Policy Debates in Seventeenth-Century Aragon, José Antonio Mateos Royo; Chapter 8 Money or Export Commodity for Asia? American Silver in the Markets of Mexico, Castile and Amsterdam from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, Renate Pieper; Chapter 9 Cacao Beans in Colonial México: Small Change in a Global Economy, Arturo Giraldez; Chapter 10 Precious Metals, Debasements and Cowrie Shells in the Medieval Indian Monetary Systems, c. 1200-1575, John S. Deyell;