[New post] How Money Was Born: The Small Seashell and the Fierce Maldivian Queen That Made the Modern World
Fernando Kaskais posted: " Money cowries How humanity turned another species into its first specie. BY MARIA POPOVA Money began as a language for expressing gratitude and became the lever of the extraction economy — the currency of aggregate human entitlement. In the gold" WebInvestigator.KK.org - by F. Kaskais
How humanity turned another species into its first specie.
BY MARIA POPOVA
Money began as a language for expressing gratitude and became the lever of the extraction economy — the currency of aggregate human entitlement. In the golden dawn of modern capitalism, Henry Miller — passionate, idealistic, and broke — sang the thrush song of warning: "The dilemma in which we find ourselves today is that no matter how much we increase the purchasing power of the wage-earner he never has enough." A century hence, the dilemma has swelled to a carbon cloud of doom — and yet money keeps washing through this pale blue dot no longer capable of regarding itself as a world without its circulating medium.
How did we get here?
It turns out we came on the back of a small marine gastropod mollusk, in the lap of a fierce Maldivian queen.
1917 map of the global distribution of cowries as currency.
In the fourteenth century, a queen known as Rehendi Khadijah ruled the islands of the Maldives with epic command. One of the earliest women leaders of an Islamic nation, she derived power from both the sultanate and Islam, even as she declined to cover her head — not to mention other parts. She led the kingdom for a third of the century despite two attempts, both by husbands, to depose her. Neither man survived the effort.
All the more remarkable was the Maldivian queen's role in the dawn of international trade. The chain of atolls, coral reefs, and lowlying islands 600 miles off the tip of India was the center of production for the first global money.
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The Maldivian tender packed up perfectly and made for excellent ship ballast. It was neither paper nor metal, though it jingled in the pocket and shined up bright as a fresh-minted coin. The first global specie was a species.
Ships arrived from all over the world, riding the southwestern summer monsoons, and filled their hulls with the Sultana's currency, the production of which she oversaw herself. The tenth-century Arab historian and geographer al-Mas'udi described the process, at once inventive and cruel:
[The Sultana] orders her islanders to cut coco-branches with their leaves, and to throw them upon the surface of the water. To these the creatures attach themselves, and are then collected and spread upon the sandy beach, where the sun rots them, and leaves only the empty shells, which are then carried to the Treasury.
16th-century Portuguese painting of Maldivian workers.
Cowry-filled ships then sailed back to their respective corners of the globe on the eastern winter monsoons. But more than perfect ballast, the Maldivian cowries made for perfect currency:
The Money Cowrie — named by Linnaeus Cypraea moneta, now classified as Monetaria moneta — makes a glistening shell in the shape of a small shield, with the cowries' characteristic domed top and flat underside cleaved by a serrated slit. Vaguely toothy, the little ivories range in color from off-white to yellowish. They are enameled, pearly, solid, satisfyingly weighty. Irresistible to pick up and worry, or clack together like dice or coins. The small, durable shells made for ideal currency: Easy to transport and to recognize. Impossible to forge. Perfect for counting — one by one, or by bag or ballast-full. Uniform in shape and size, they yielded a precise value when weighed.
The notion of imbuing a strange ocean shell with value had begun much earlier, with the twin forces of human vanity: superstition and personal aesthetics. As early as the Stone Age, cowries were used as jewelry, amulets, and healing objects. Strings of them — both real shells and gold-cast replicas — were found in Egyptian tombs, believed to bring fertility, protect against the Evil Eye, and bring good fortune in the afterlife.
So accustomed to seeing immaterial worth in these material objects, these vacant homes of tiny lives, people then readily harnessed their practical conveniences — small, light, portable, easy to see, hard to fake — for the perfect fusion of myth and merchandize. (Money, it bears remembering, has always been and will always remain a consensual reality — a handshake of beliefs with no inherent value and no direct equivalence to objects in the material world.)...
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