Life – a user's manual Part II - Boksidan

Siam (Thailand) Rice (80%) No data
Spain Fruit (34%) 0.61
UK Cotton goods (53%) 0.70
Sweden Wood products, paper & pulp (48%) 0.89
Tjeckoslovakia Cotton products & sugar (47%) 1.22
Turkey Tobacco (42%), fruits and vegetables (24%) 0.58
Germany Iron & textiles (38%) 0.99
Hungary Wheat & wheat flour (37%) 0.95
Uruguay Animal products (90%) 0.74
USA Raw cotton (31%) 1.56
Venezuela Coffee, cocoa & oil 1.83
Austria Metals, metal products & cotton products (41%) 0.57
Currency
People have traded things with each other long before there were coins and banknotes. Many times the deals
were direct replacements like one salmon for five apples. But other times both parties it did not have an
article the other needed and then they needed an intermediary that the seller could use to buy what he wanted
from a third person. Precious metals appeared in many cultures as an appropriate intermediate, since these
are:
1. Easy to maintain, even in larger quantities without getting destroyed and they do not decrease in value.
2. Easy to transport, i. e. high value in relation to weight and volume.
3. Easy to divide into larger and smaller quantities.
In the beginning purchases that were not replacements were paid with precious metal chunks cutted from
jewelry and the like. The next step was gold and silver pieces with uniform size and fineness. From there it
was a short step to that the state guaranteed the size and metal content and had a monopoly on the
production. When the metal pieces were stamped with different kinds of sovereignty symbols they had
turned into coins.
The Roman Empire, for example, had a well-developed coinage system. Coins made of brass, bronze,
copper, silver and gold, were minted and distributed according to strict rules of weights, sizes, value and
metal composition.
In Sweden we had until 1624 almost exclusively silver coins because we (due to Sala silver mine) had quite
a lot of silver.
Swedish silver coin
(halvörtug) from 1480.
The picture is a blow
up. In reality the coin
has a diameter of about
13 mm.
Prior to 1534 the coins were called mark, penny (= 1/8 marks), örtug (= 1/24 marks) and penning (= 1/192
marks). 1534 we also introduced daler in silver, later called crowns and a shilling that was worth 4 marks.
1624, we also introduced a copper dalern whose metal content would have the same value as the
corresponding silver coins. The coppers market value in relation to silver was, however, reduced and thus
the cupper coins value decreased relative to silver coins of the same denomination. It was, therefore,
necessary to distinguish between daler copper and daler silver.
The system was discontinued after 1776, when Sweden switched to pure silver standard, with coins crowns
specie, shilling (1/48 daler specie) and rundstycken (1/576 daler specie). Additionally there were notes
called Riksdaler banco. The notes redeemed until 1808 with silver coins and was equivalent to riksdaler
specie. Since then they became impossible to change into silver and their value fell.
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