Preliminary Programme

This paper focuses on the intersection of money and institutions from the perspective of material practice, stressing how the uses and limits of economic tools like coins and writing in the Roman world grew out of the particular organizational frameworks in which they were required to work. In scholarship, discussions of “money” often attempt to move beyond physical forms, while money (in whatever form), writing, and measures are often lumped together as historic developments and assumed to work in similar ways. However, specific technical uses of writing (in accounting, for example) and coins had long traditions of practice that were not necessarily identical or unified across contexts. In the Roman period, the specific form of money-as-coins, and the specific types of writing employed in accounting and other documents, took different forms within different communities. In particular, coins specifically dominated the cognitive framework of localized urban exchange in to the exclusion of most writing. The latter remained much more prevalent in contexts of large estates and taxation. These organizational entities could create larger networks within which they controlled distribution of materials and value substitutions of one item for another, the latter techniques evolving from different traditions and along different historical channels than the use of coins. (Show less)

The fiscal stress of the Second Punic War led to the creation of a new Roman monetary system around 211 BCE. Based on the denarius, a coin initially minted at 72 to the pound of silver, this system would spread throughout the Empire and remain in use for centuries. However, the initial period of the denarius coinage remains the least understood. Why, for example, did the weight standard of the denarius (as well as its bronze fraction, the as) fluctuate so much in the early decades of its production? Why does the production of bronze coinage decline steadily beginning in the 150s? Why was the denarius revalued in the 140s BCE? Why did Roman coinage spread to different provinces at different rates? To shed new light on these old questions, this paper will examine the institutions and groups most likely responsible for spreading the use of the denarius in the second century BCE: the Roman army, societates (partnerships involved in state contracts), bankers, and merchants. Rome’s new monetary system spread hand in hand with more sophisticated financial practices and, while its success was undoubtedly the result of the unprecedented amounts of precious metal pouring into the Roman treasury, its evolution – the changes in the content and face value of the coins as well as the overall composition of the money supply – was due to a series of negotiations between the state and the main ‘consumers’ of its coinage. (Show less)

Hoards and stray coins finds are often used as a proxy to study the degree of monetisation of an economy. Using the well documented evidence from Campania, I will argue that this is not a good choice. The monetised nature of an economy should be understood as a structural property of the prevalent transaction system. Money is an institution; it belongs to the ‘rules of the game’ determining how transactions can take place. Currency is merely an instrument to which these rules apply. Credit, kind and bullion provide other transaction modes. (Show less)