@Naomasa298 DUNEs over arcing currency is the Spice Melange. It was so rare it could only be found on one planet in the entire universe Arrakis. Its unique properties allowed navigation through space at FTL limits. It also extended one’s life expectancy but was highly addictive. I’d call spice the most valuable product that existed, but not really a tradable currency. He who controlled its production, controlled the populated universe. Lethro II (God emperor) destruction of spice production collapsed FTL travel. He still controlled the masses though without spice without its currency... Great point, Herbert’s use of religion power and politics was staggering MartinM
It's not that though. The spice was a commodity, I wouldn't necessarily call it a currency. The point I was making was that, we learn a lot about how the economy works in (pre-Leto II) Dune, at least for the Houses, through the auspices of the CHOAM company, but the currency itself is never mentioned, from memory. It's possible to build a rich background with no mention of these details at all. Just don't introduce an economy-breaking maguffin (Star Trek replicators, I'm looking at you).
It could well be, I haven't read the books in a while even though I love them. But it wasn't memorable or an important enough detail for me to remember.
Yeah, I daresay it's completely revisionist. There's a certain current of thinking, still running today, that strives to avoid as much as possible acknowledging how insanely horrible the British empire was.
@Naomasa298 Agree spice was a commodity and I can’t remember any mention on currencies. You make a good point that he built a rich background with no mention of these local details. It is possible, and he just used the commodity’s leverage against each political faction. And even if he did, like you said it wasn’t memorable. That’s the point the economy seemed to hold up and make sense. MartinM
Aha! I got your point, touche. But they never made a point to make it interesting or focus on it. Doesn't mean that it's always disinteresting. Actually there is an anime called spice and wolf or something which I vaguely remember having a super interesting episode about currency arbitrage. It's as interesting or boring as anything else and it's just a question of skill and direction whether it will be interesting to some people.
Tbh, I love reading all your posts on this topic. I'm a perfectionist when it comes to worldbuilding - for me, every single thing has to make sense, at least in my head (things like currencies, politics, resources, etc are mostly for me to visualize the world better. Whether everything will make its appearance in the story is a different matter altogether ). To give you a better idea of what I need the currencies for I guess I'll try to describe what motif I'm going for in my novel. The world is supposed to be going through an ideological conflict fueled by the main political power in the world - the mages guild. Though the guild is technically not allied with any country, they are unofficially backed by the "Triad" - a union of three countries with the most powerful economy in the world. This agreement allows the Triad to propagate their own worldview through the mages under the pretense of "peaceful help" that the guild offers to other countries. This agreement also serves to obtain control over the different sectors of the world - this includes the economy. They are the ones that distribute the Fiery coin and try to advocate for a big, worldwide, globalized government where every country plays but a small role while casting their members into the roles of advisors and peace bringers to obtain real control over. Hence where the economy gets into play. My idea was to have different cultural "sectors" in the world that would use their own currency. Then, that currency would be violently thrown into the slowly forming world of the global economy, with its value being dependant on its country's strength and - more importantly - how the mages guild sees that country in their political game. With the northern cultural sector divided between two religious countries of Septrion and Aprion, the guild would divide the currency in two to devalue the economy of the country that resist their cultural influence more. They would, of course, hide this fact by saying that there was a perfectly valid reason for the Northern Flavis to lose value. Before the appearance of the mages, this coin could only be made by costly rituals done by the seers and priests. But now, since one country (Septrion) accepted the mages help, Septrion can use magic to create their coins, cutting the production costs (the amount of resin needed, the time it takes to make them, etc) drastically, making the Aprion's coins far less obtainable for the common people. Therefore, the mages would destabilize the economy of those two countries by strengthening their allies while crippling their rivals. At least in my head - as you can see, my understanding of the economy is rather basic. Sorry for rambling. This may seem narcissistic, but I really love talking about my WIP. I want to create a world that seems almost as complex and interesting as the one we're living in, so I tend to focus a lot on small details. If you think this idea is stupid, I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me
The best way to destabilise a pre-modern economy is to flood the market with MORE of the coin, not less. The more there are, the less each one is worth, and if other production remains the same, causes prices to rocket. When the Spanish discovered gold in South America, they brought back so much of it that it caused high inflation in the Spanish economy. Similarly, it's always been the case that, when rulers need more cash, they debase the currency - that is, reduce the amount of precious metal content in a coin but declare it to have the same value as the old coins. This has the same effect - there are now more coins, but they're considered lower in value. It's like - if your economy produces 100 socks, and has 100 gold pieces in circulation, then each sock is worth 1 gold piece. If you now introduce another 100 gold pieces, but you still only have 100 socks, each sock is now worth 2 gold pieces. I'm conflating the two things (introducing more coins vs debasing existing coins) slightly, but the end result is the same. Here's an illustration of the Japanese koban (small gold coin) over time: The shoguns needed more money, so they progressively made the coins smaller and smaller. It got to the point where fakes of older coins (which contained less gold by size than the real ones) were worth more than the new coins!
Thanks, I'll have to keep that in mind. It actually makes a lot more sense. And it would be quadruply insidious for the mages to "help" Aprion with their coin production only to destabilize their economy. It fits my story perfectly. Thank you so much!
I'm currently reading Metro 2033 and the currency in that book is bullets. There are plenty of them for people to exchange (because your currency needs to be something there is a lot of) but also something people would find valuable, because they need them for self-defence (so the abundance of them doesn't devalue them in any way). I guess you have to think about your setting and how it emerged. Currencies tend to evolve rather than be invented. They form out of cultural practices, so what practices exist in your world? In Metro 2033, generations of people hiding in the Moscow underground with plenty of bullets gradually found them useful as a unit of exchange for goods or services. If the characters were living in the woods, a universal unit of exchange would not only emerge from what was available, but also how the communities were structured and interacted. One giant society would have a different idea of how fair exchange worked compared to lots of distinct groups or individual families.
Currency is something you can easily gloss over in your story. He paid the storekeeper, picked up his purchases and left. You don't have to specify what he handed over in payment. Alternatively, your story could include financial issues which need explanation. In one of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy books, a group of people chose leaves as a currency because they were convenient to use and easily available. Then they were faced with a massive inflation problem because so many people had so many leaves. Their solution was to burn down all the trees, destroying their most valuable natural resource. This was a most stupid thing yo do but it made perfect economic sense. The moral so the story is this; don't place the future of the planet in the hands of economists. Thankfully, in our society, we're safe from this because . . . oh, wait.
Not a fable. As the Word Detective tells us (and his is another valuable resource for writers), there really were wooden nickels:
This is a useful case for an author inventing fantasy currencies to study. The Chinese smugglers used to trade with a variety of freelance opium merchants, from India and elsewhere. They would row off coast at night in little boats (the Chinese state didn't have meaningful naval presence) and trade bags of silver for opium. The EIC's innovation was to give the opium farmers near its Indian 'factories' (the trading offices of company agents, or factors) high value low interest loans to improve their productivity and reliability as suppliers. Their factory system for preparing opium was also more efficient. The two advantages allowed them to out-compete the freelancers. The EIC ships then replaced the freelance ones moored off-shore at night, exchanging with the smugglers in their little boats. Tea was then bought legitimately with that silver as a separate exchange. So the author of a fantasy world can think: Where are the borders for goods, when one currency is used and another isn't? Do my characters sneak out past the frontier with pockets full of coins shaped like dangerous foreign gods, otherwise strictly controlled in that country, in order to buy illicit goods from strange dark figures? And don't the strange dark figures sound quite a lot like those merchants who, in the daylight, walk straight into the opulent Commercial Rooms in the centre of the capital and buy up all the finest silks and spices with an endless supply of the same coins shaped like heathen gods? There is a great deal of revisionism trying to downplay the horrors of British imperialism and commerce. However in the case of the opium trade some revision is useful, because it was British moralists, along with Chinese mandarins, who carefully created the most common narrative, that of Britain deliberately undermining China, softening the people up until they were rendered helpless with opium. That narrative was a construct to serve people's aims. Even if it was in parts (or even largely) true it was still a narrative to drive an agenda or two, not just a sober historical assessment. An opposing narrative you can easily find fleshed out in various books if you're interested: The opium trade didn't just solve the EIC's silver shortage; it exacerbated a silver shortage in China, in the inverse (predictably). The Chinese government therefore felt an urgent need to suppress the illicit trade of silver for opium in order to secure their finances. The British moralists had taken strongly against opium, it was the big scare of the day, and not without (limited) reason. In truth, whilst smoking opium really isn't great for you, it wasn't comparable to scenes from Trainspotting. That stuff was far milder. In China at the time it was mostly being smoked by peasants and other workers on their lunch break, or after work, and wasn't much worse than drinking spirits on your lunch break like they were doing in Europe. A bad habit, but Chinese social collapse was not the primary motive behind suppressing the opium trade, and subjugating the Chinese was not the primary motive behind the EIC's trade. That's before the wars, of course. After the wars things get muddier. That isn't the authoritative version of what happened, but its an important counter view and not grossly inaccurate. Its not my interpretation by the way. I'm not a historian. I parrot. Sometimes its worth revising the original narrative when it gets to an interesting alternative. In this case its interesting because it was all about this wild inter-play between three of the world's most tradeable 'goods currencies', tea, opium, and, most of all, silver.
