Money
Created | Updated Apr 14, 2002
In the early days when man as a hunter gatherer increasingly settled in one place to become man the farmer individuals would gradually aquire a kind of wealth, so many domesticated animals, so much crop season by season, and this wealth would be bartered with others of his kind locally to allow trade by barter to flourish.
When man developed a taste to travel he would naturally want to take his new found wealth with him to allow further trade and commerce to take place with others of his kind in foreign climes, of course it proved impractical to take stored crops and many animals to remote locations sometimes many days travel from his home village and therefore a method of representation of his wealth had to be found.
Now it was no good him taking acorns or leaves as these and other easily obtainable items could be aquired by anyone no matter how poor to represent wealth and therefore a less easily obtainable commodity had to be found to represent accumulated wealth.
Our man searched around and discovered that after enormous effort and expenditure of energy and lives that Gold and other rare metals could be extracted from the earth, these could be used to create tokens for wealth as our wealthy few were the only ones who could barter enough goods to persuade others to grub in the earth for these rare metals. Hence the concept of tokens representing wealth(Money)was born.
Later paper script as a form of money came into being and this paper was in effect a promisary note or IOU from an individual or collective that the bearer of such note would be recompensed by the issuer to the tune of a certain amount of precious metal (usually gold - hence the gold standard. Some paper notes were more reliable than others and as time passed it became usual that the government of countries issued these notes as they were deemed reliable enough to back up the promise made in the note(not always true of course).
These days credit cards or electronic commerce is the norm but who knows what the future of commerce will hold with the internet driving away the need for physical financial transactions to take place...
When man developed a taste to travel he would naturally want to take his new found wealth with him to allow further trade and commerce to take place with others of his kind in foreign climes, of course it proved impractical to take stored crops and many animals to remote locations sometimes many days travel from his home village and therefore a method of representation of his wealth had to be found.
Now it was no good him taking acorns or leaves as these and other easily obtainable items could be aquired by anyone no matter how poor to represent wealth and therefore a less easily obtainable commodity had to be found to represent accumulated wealth.
Our man searched around and discovered that after enormous effort and expenditure of energy and lives that Gold and other rare metals could be extracted from the earth, these could be used to create tokens for wealth as our wealthy few were the only ones who could barter enough goods to persuade others to grub in the earth for these rare metals. Hence the concept of tokens representing wealth(Money)was born.
Later paper script as a form of money came into being and this paper was in effect a promisary note or IOU from an individual or collective that the bearer of such note would be recompensed by the issuer to the tune of a certain amount of precious metal (usually gold - hence the gold standard. Some paper notes were more reliable than others and as time passed it became usual that the government of countries issued these notes as they were deemed reliable enough to back up the promise made in the note(not always true of course).
These days credit cards or electronic commerce is the norm but who knows what the future of commerce will hold with the internet driving away the need for physical financial transactions to take place...
