Timeline of currencies

This is a timeline of currencies. It traces money's evolution from Mesopotamian clay tokens and commodity exchange through coinage, banking, paper money, and the gold standard, to fiat currency and cryptocurrency. Drawing on multiple historical and economic sources, it tracks recurring patterns: monetary innovation, debasement, financial crisis, and institutional reform across four millennia.

Sample questions

The following are some interesting questions that can be answered by reading this timeline:

• What are the main forms that money has taken throughout history?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Currency type" and look at the distinct values present.
  • You will see five broad categories — commodity money, metallic coin, bank money, paper money, and fiat currency — each with its own era of dominance and characteristic vulnerabilities.
• How have governments financed wars when ordinary taxation fell short?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Event type" and look for the group of rows with value "Currency issue", paying attention to wartime years.
  • You will see paper money and currency debasement repeatedly used as substitutes for taxation, from the American Revolution and the French assignats through the Civil War United States Note.
• What happens when the money supply increases faster than the supply of goods?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Event type" and look for the group of rows with value "Inflation".
  • You will see recurring episodes — the Price Revolution, Continental currency, the assignats — in which a rapid expansion of money produces a corresponding rise in prices.
• Why do monetary systems that work well in peacetime tend to break down during wars?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Event type" and look for the group of rows with values "Currency crisis" and "Currency issue" together.
  • You will see convertibility repeatedly suspended and paper issued without restraint during major conflicts, only to be restored, with difficulty, once peace returns.
• How have banking institutions evolved over time?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Currency type" and look for the group of rows with value "Bank money".
  • You will see banking develop from Renaissance Italian deposit houses through the Amsterdam Exchange Bank to the Bank of England and the American central banking experiments.
• What role does public trust play in the value of money?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Event type" and look for the group of rows with value "Currency crisis".
  • You will see that money loses its function the moment public confidence collapses, regardless of whether it is backed by metal, government decree, or algorithmic design.
• What patterns recur across different monetary crises throughout history?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Event type" and look for the group of rows with value "Currency crisis" or "Speculation".
  • You will see a consistent sequence of innovation, overexpansion, loss of confidence, and collapse, followed eventually by some form of institutional reform.
• How have governments attempted to control the money supply, and with what results?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Event type" and look for the group of rows with value "Monetary policy".
  • You will see tools ranging from debasement and legal tender laws to bank rate adjustments and the gold standard, with mixed success in preventing future crises.
• What is the relationship between money and political power?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Geographical location" and compare entries across different governments and empires.
  • You will see that control over currency issuance has repeatedly been a source of both political legitimacy and popular grievance, from Roman imperial coin portraits to the founding of central banks.

Big picture

Time period	Development summary	More details
c. 9000 BCE–7th century BCE	Pre-coinage foundations	The intellectual and institutional groundwork for currency accumulates across millennia before any standardized metal token exists. Human societies rely on barter and commodity moneys — cattle, grain, salt, shells, and cloth — chosen for their broad social trust rather than intrinsic monetary design. In Mesopotamia, small clay tokens used for Denise Schmandt-Besserat evolve into cuneiform writing and abstract numeracy, the conceptual foundation for all later monetary record-keeping. Sumerian silver ingots and Egyptian gold establish metal-by-weight as a recognized standard of value, while the Code of Ur-Nammu codifies monetary restitution for physical harm. All the necessary ingredients for coinage — standardized weight, durable material, and institutional trust — accumulate independently across these civilizations; what remains missing is the stamped guarantee that turns weighed metal into a true coin.
~700 BCE–1st century BCE	Coinage and its discontents	Coinage emerges nearly simultaneously in Lydia, on the Greek island of Aegina, and in China, before spreading rapidly through trade, conquest, and civic imitation across the Mediterranean and into India in the wake of Alexander's campaigns. The Roman Republic denarius, introduced in 211 BCE, becomes the dominant Mediterranean currency for five centuries, its name surviving in the dinar, the penny, and the denaro. Coinage's earliest adoption immediately produces the temptations it never escapes: rulers debase metal content while maintaining face value, private actors counterfeit and clip coins, and sovereigns stamp their own portraits onto currency as instruments of both legitimacy and posthumous erasure. Greek city-states monetize civic life so thoroughly that by the fifth century BCE Athens pays citizens for jury duty, military service, and assembly attendance — coinage dissolving older bonds of social reciprocity into abstract financial relationships.
7th century CE–17th century CE	Credit, paper, and early banking	A wave of financial innovation outside Europe predates and outpaces Western developments. The medieval Islamic world builds a vigorous credit economy on the stable dinar, pioneering cheques, promissory notes, and long-distance debt transfer. Song dynasty China introduces the world's first true government-backed paper money, the jiaozi, while the Knights Templar issue early traveler's notes to pilgrims and English kings resort to wooden tally sticks during recurrent gold shortages. In Europe, Italian city-states — Venice, Genoa, and the banking houses of the Medici — revive deposit banking and credit instruments after centuries of religious prohibition on usury. The Amsterdam Exchange Bank, founded in 1609, establishes the most influential template for sound public deposit banking, directly motivated by the chaos of debased coinage flooding Europe after a century of American silver imports.
1661–1800	Paper money experiments and their collapses	Sweden introduces Europe's first regular paper currency in 1661, an experiment that ends in overissue and its founder's death sentence — a pattern repeated with even greater drama in John Law (economist)'s Mississippi Company scheme and the Banque Royale in France, whose collapse discredits French paper money for nearly a century. Colonial America develops its own paper traditions under British restriction, financing the Revolution almost entirely through Continental currency that depreciates to near worthlessness. The French Revolutionary assignats attempt to back paper money with confiscated Church land rather than gold or silver, an innovation that ties currency value to revolutionary success and ultimately fails for the same reason as its predecessors: issuance outpaces restraint. New France's playing-card money survives seventy-five years before evaporating entirely once severed from its issuing sovereign by British conquest.
1694–1873	Central banking and the rise of the gold standard	The Bank of England, founded in 1694, develops over the following century and a half the full template of modern central banking: the bank rate as a policy instrument, open-market operations, and the role of lender of last resort, formally articulated following the 1825 and 1890 crises. Similar institutions follow across Europe — the Banque de France, the Reichsbank — while the United States twice charters and twice destroys a central bank amid fierce political controversy over the proper locus of monetary power. The United States moves de facto onto gold by the 1830s as free banking produces chaotic over-issuance of thousands of distinct bank notes, a disorder resolved only by Civil War finance and the National Bank Act. The 1867 Paris conference formalizes the classical international gold standard, under which the Bank of England functions as de facto guardian of global monetary stability.
1900s–1971	The retreat from metal	The twentieth century dismantles, piece by piece, the assumption that currency requires intrinsic metallic value. Cigarettes and alcohol displace the collapsed Reichsmark in postwar Germany, illustrating money's underlying dependence on trust rather than substance. The United States eliminates silver from its dimes and quarters in 1965, a quiet prelude to the decisive break: Richard Nixon's 1971 suspension of dollar-gold convertibility, the Nixon shock, which ends the Bretton Woods system and inaugurates a global regime of floating fiat currencies grounded purely in government decree and public confidence rather than metal.
1983–2025	Cryptography, fiat consolidation, and digital currency	David Chaum's 1983 cryptographic work on blind signatures lays early conceptual groundwork later drawn upon by cryptocurrency designers. ISO 4217 standardizes global currency codes for an increasingly interconnected financial system in 1978. Credit cards, introduced commercially in 1950, gradually transform currency from a physical token into a claim on privately extended credit. In 2009 Bitcoin emerges as the first successful decentralized digital currency, challenging the assumption that money requires either commodity backing or sovereign issuance. El Salvador becomes the first nation to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021, the same year China declares all cryptocurrency transactions illegal — demonstrating that even a currency designed to escape state control remains dependent on the physical and legal infrastructure states can restrict. The 2022 collapse of the Terra/UST stablecoin echoes, in compressed digital time, the oldest pattern in monetary history: a peg or promise loses all value the moment public trust in the mechanism behind it breaks.

Full timeline

Inclusion criteria

We include:

• Datable monetary innovations — new forms of money, coinage systems, banking institutions, or payment technologies — that establish a template subsequently adopted, adapted, or rejected by other societies.
• Currency crises, collapses, and panics where confidence in a monetary instrument breaks down, along with the institutional or policy response that follows.
• Formal articulations of monetary theory or law (e.g. Gresham's law, the quantity theory of money) that subsequently shape monetary policy or economic thought.
• Founding, reform, or collapse of major monetary and banking institutions (central banks, exchange banks, national bank systems) that materially affect the money supply or monetary policy of a state or region.
• Major flows of precious metal or shifts in metallic supply that produce documented price or monetary effects, such as the Price Revolution or the California Gold Rush.
• Legislative or constitutional acts that define what counts as legal tender, restrict or authorize currency issuance, or otherwise reallocate monetary authority between institutions or levels of government.
• Backdrop and prelude events — pre-monetary accounting systems, proto-currencies, and early commodity exchanges — that illuminate the cognitive and institutional origins of money even before currency in the modern sense exists.

We exclude:

• Routine fluctuations in exchange rates, interest rates, or asset prices that do not reflect a structural change in a monetary system.
• Minor administrative changes to currency design, denomination, or production (e.g. cosmetic redesigns of banknotes) that do not affect a currency's monetary function or legal status.
• Individual corporate or personal financial transactions, however large, unless they trigger a systemic monetary or banking crisis.
• Routine annual central bank policy statements or rate-setting decisions that do not mark a meaningfully new direction in monetary policy.
• General economic history (trade routes, agricultural output, industrial production) except where it bears directly and demonstrably on the money supply or a currency's value.

Year	Currency type	Event type	Details	Geographical location
c. 9000–3000 BCE	Commodity money	Commodity money	Before the emergence of standardized currency, human societies across the ancient world conduct exchange through barter and through the use of commodities that possess broad social trust — cattle, grain, salt, shells, and other goods serving as proto-currencies whose value derives from their direct utility rather than from any monetary convention. The reliance on commodities as exchange media imposes significant practical constraints: units are often indivisible, perishable, or difficult to transport, and assessing equivalence between dissimilar goods requires negotiation at every transaction. The gradual transition from barter to commodity money, and from commodity money to metallic money, represents one of the longest and least documented transformations in economic history, laying the cognitive and institutional groundwork for all subsequent monetary systems.	Ancient Near East, Mediterranean, Asia
~5000 BCE	Commodity money	Commodity money	The Sumer, in modern-day Iraq, begin to produce silver ingots used as a standard measurement and currency, representing one of the earliest documented instances of a metal serving a monetary function rather than purely ornamental or utilitarian purposes. The innovation emerges from the same civilization credited with inventing the wheel and early arithmetic, reflecting the broader Sumerian project of standardizing measurement and quantification across economic, agricultural, and administrative domains. Silver ingots of standardized weight predate true coinage by more than four millennia, requiring assessment of weight and purity at each transaction rather than carrying a stamped guarantee of value — the same practical limitation that later Lydian coinage is designed to solve.	Iraq (Sumer, Mesopotamia)
~4000–3100 BCE	Commodity money	Commodity money	In Uruk, Mesopotamia, archaeologists discover quantities of small baked clay objects — cubes, pyramids, cylinders, and cones — used as accounting tokens representing different commodities in daily life: a sheep, a loaf of bread, a jar of honey. First identified by French archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat in the 1970s as a system of correspondence counting, these tokens represent the earliest known proto-monetary technology, allowing temple storehouse administrators to track the flow of goods in and out of centralized granaries without requiring abstract numeracy. A number of tokens are inserted into a clay envelope, sealed, and tally marks made on the outside to denote the kind and number of tokens inside — five sheep, ten baskets of grain, seven jars of honey — with the marks eventually superseding the tokens themselves as the primary record. The system constitutes the direct precursor to both writing and numeracy: the abstract marks on the envelope-tablets that began as impressions of commodity tokens evolve into cuneiform script, making Mesopotamian accounting the origin point not only of monetary record-keeping but of written language itself.	Iraq (Uruk, Mesopotamia)
~4000 BCE	Commodity money	Commodity money	The Ancient Egypt begin using gold as a form of currency around 4000 BCE, drawing on the abundant gold deposits of the Eastern Desert and Nubia that make Egypt one of the wealthiest sources of the metal in the ancient world. Egyptian gold circulates initially by weight rather than as standardized coinage, serving in trade, taxation, and as a store of value for the state and temple establishments long before the Lydian innovation of stamped coinage in the 7th century BCE. The early and sustained Egyptian association between gold and sovereign wealth — gold being reserved for pharaohs, temples, and the highest tiers of the elite — establishes a cultural template in which gold functions simultaneously as currency and as a marker of supreme political and religious authority, an association that persists in royal and state symbolism for millennia after Egypt's pharaonic period ends.	Egypt
~3000 BCE	Commodity money	Monetary theory	The accounting system developed in Uruk during the preceding millennium produces three momentous inventions that transform human civilization: accounting, writing, and numeracy. When ancient administrators realize it would be simpler to make marks on clay tablets with a reed pen rather than using clumsy three-dimensional tokens, cuneiform writing is born — composed of lines, triangles, circles, and other marks representing stylized impressions of the original commodity tokens. A further burst of creativity produces the separation of (1) a commodity and (2) its quantity into two distinct symbols, requiring only two marks to record any quantity of anything, including the 140,000 measures of grain that appear on one surviving tablet. The invention of numeracy — the abstract concept of number independent of the physical objects being counted — represents a cognitive leap whose monetary implications are profound: value can now be expressed, recorded, and transmitted without the physical presence of the commodity it represents, establishing the conceptual foundation for all subsequent monetary abstraction from metallic coin through paper money to digital currency.	Uruk, Mesopotamia15:19Iraq (Uruk, Mesopotamia)
2112–2095 BCE	Commodity money	Monetary theory	The Code of Ur-Nammu, written in Sumerian language by Ur-Nammu, king of Ur, during his reign from 2112 to 2095 BCE, provides what is considered the earliest written evidence of money being used as payment for legal restitution. Law 22 of the code specifies that if a man knocks out the tooth of another man, he must pay two shekels of silver — establishing silver by weight as a recognized unit of legal and economic account centuries before the emergence of standardized coinage. The codification of monetary restitution for specific physical injuries demonstrates that by the early second millennium BCE, Mesopotamian society has already developed a sophisticated conceptual link between abstract monetary value and concrete physical harm, a legal innovation that anticipates the broader function of money as a universal measure of value applicable across radically different kinds of goods, services, and obligations.	Iraq (Sumer, Ur, Mesopotamia)
~2000 BC	Commodity money	Commodity money	For roughly four thousand years prior to the modern era, silver, copper, and gold serve as the dominant metals for exchange across civilizations, with silver generally pre-eminent and gold rising to prominence under specific polities such as the Mycenaean civilization and in Constantinople following the division of the Roman Empire. The natural alloy electrum, combining silver and gold, also circulates during this period. The predominance of silver over gold reflects practical availability rather than any formal hierarchy; the biblical account of Judas Iscariot receiving thirty pieces of silver for betraying Jesus illustrates that silver represents the standard medium for ordinary commercial transactions of the era, with gold reserved for exceptional dealings. The four-millennium consensus around metallic money establishes the foundational assumption — later repeatedly challenged — that money must carry intrinsic value in the material of which it is made.	Ancient Near East, Mediterranean
~1200 BCE	Commodity money	Commodity money	Cowrie shells, produced by marine mollusks found in the coastal waters of the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean, come into use as currency around 1200 BCE, representing one of the earliest and most geographically widespread monetary systems in recorded history. The shells offer several practical advantages over other commodity moneys: they are similar in size, small, durable, and difficult to counterfeit in their natural form. The expansion of trade carries cowrie shell currency far beyond its origins, with even some European countries accepting the shells as a medium of exchange; in Africa the shells circulate as currency for centuries, and wampum — tubular shell beads used by Indigenous peoples of the Americas — represents a parallel shell-money tradition in the Americas. The longevity and geographic reach of cowrie shell currency — spanning from coastal Asia through Africa and into Europe — demonstrates that the monetary function can be served by any object commanding sufficiently broad social trust, regardless of intrinsic utility, anticipating the later insight that the value of money is ultimately a social convention rather than a physical property.	Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Africa, Americas
~7th century BC	Metallic coin	Coinage	The Kingdom of Lydia is credited by Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, with being the first people to coin gold and silver and to conduct retail trade, developing the practice in their Greek colonies in Sicily and Italy where it becomes a major art form. Coinage emerges as a solution to the inconvenience of weighing and assessing the quality of metal in powder or chunk form for every transaction, replacing an arrangement that is more awkward than cattle or other primitive moneys for practical purposes. The Lydian innovation of stamping metal into coins of predetermined weight spreads to the Greek cities and their colonies, establishing the template for metallic currency that dominates commerce for the following two millennia. Coinage also immediately introduces the temptation of debasement, as rulers discover they can reduce the metal content of coins while nominally maintaining their face value.	Turkey (Lydia), Ancient Greece
~700 BCE	Metallic coin	Coinage	The first coins of the Greek world, imprinted with a turtle in relief, appear around 700 BCE on the island of Aegina, in close chronological proximity to the Lydian invention of coinage across the Aegean Sea in Asia Minor. The Aeginetan turtle coin becomes one of the most widely circulated and imitated coin types of the archaic Greek world, its turtle emblem serving as a civic and trade identifier recognized across the Mediterranean basin in much the same way that national currency symbols function today. The near-simultaneous emergence of coinage in Lydia and on Aegina, separated by the Aegean Sea, illustrates how rapidly the innovation of standardized, government-guaranteed metal tokens spreads once introduced, with Greek city-states independently adapting the concept to their own civic emblems and trading networks within a generation of its first appearance.	Greece (Aegina, Ancient Greece)
~6th century BCE	Commodity money	Commodity money	Around the 6th century BCE, leather and animal hide begin to be fashioned into currency across several distinct civilizations, with early ancient Rome reportedly among the first users of this form of money. Leather currency also appears in Carthage and in regions of what is now France, while Russia is believed to have continued using leather money as late as the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725 CE) — one of the longest documented runs of any commodity money in European history. The Han dynasty Emperor Wu of Han (reigned 141–87 BCE) creates a prestige variant of skin currency from white stags drawn from his personal imperial collection, fringed and decorated with elaborate designs, illustrating that skin money could function as much as a marker of sovereign authority as a practical medium of exchange. The leather money tradition may have left a lasting linguistic legacy: some etymologists believe it gave rise to the use of "buck" as slang for dollar, through the earlier use of buckskin as a unit of trade on the American frontier.	Italy (Ancient Rome), Tunisia (Carthage), France, Russia, China
~600 BCE	Metallic coin	Coinage	China issues bronze spade money tokens around 600 BCE, followed by sword money at approximately 450 BCE, representing one of the earliest independent developments of metallic coinage outside the Lydian tradition. The spade and sword shapes derive from the actual agricultural and utilitarian tools that had previously served as commodity money in earlier exchange, with the metal tokens retaining the symbolic form of the objects they replace — a pattern common to monetary transitions in which new instruments of exchange preserve visual reference to the commodity moneys they supersede. China subsequently develops round bronze coins with a hole in the middle, a form that persists for centuries and becomes the iconic image of Chinese currency, with the central hole allowing coins to be strung together for convenient transport and storage. The independent Chinese development of coinage, roughly contemporaneous with the Lydian invention, demonstrates that the transition from commodity to metallic token money is not a singular historical event but a convergent innovation arising wherever sufficiently complex commercial economies require a portable, standardized, and durable medium of exchange.	China
540 BC	Metallic coin	Counterfeiting	Polycrates of Samos is said to have cheated the Sparta with coins of simulated gold, representing one of the earliest recorded instances of counterfeiting in the ancient world. The episode illustrates that coinage, from its earliest adoption, functions simultaneously as a convenience and an invitation to fraud — both by rulers debasing the metal content of official coins and by private actors clipping, shaving, or fabricating currency outright. The persistence of debasement and counterfeiting across antiquity reflects the structural tension between the promise of standardized coinage and the incentives created whenever money carries more face value than its intrinsic metal content.	Greece (Samos, Ancient Greece)
~480 BCE	Metallic coin	Coinage	By 480 BCE nearly one hundred mints are operating around the Aegean Sea, reflecting the rapid spread of the Lydian coinage innovation across the Greek world following its introduction in the 7th century BCE. The proliferation of mints transforms coinage from a royal monopoly into a widespread civic institution, with individual city-state issuing their own coins bearing distinctive symbols and portraits that serve simultaneously as monetary instruments and assertions of political identity and sovereignty. In Athens, the monetization of civic life reaches its fullest expression: jury service, magistracy, military service, and attendance at public festivals are all paid in coin, and by the fourth century BCE citizens are paid to attend the assembly to vote on legislation — making Athens, in the words of Pericles, "a salary-drawing city." The Greek experience demonstrates that the social consequences of widespread coinage extend far beyond commerce: by converting traditional social obligations into financial relationships, coinage dissolves the bonds of reciprocity and status that had organized pre-monetary societies and replaces them with the abstract, transferable, and anonymous relationships of a money economy.	Ancient Greece, Aegean
326 BCE	Metallic coin	Coinage	The coinage tradition of Lydia and the Greek world reaches India in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE), with Greek-influenced coins appearing in the regions of his eastern campaigns; some Indian coins, however, have been dated somewhat earlier, to approximately 400 BCE, suggesting that Indian coinage may have developed independently or through earlier trade contact rather than purely as a consequence of Alexander's invasion. Seleucid Empire coins minted in the region after Alexander's death blend Greek iconography — the head of Zeus, the figure of Athena — with locally resonant imagery such as elephants, reflecting the hybrid political and cultural order of the Hellenistic successor kingdoms that briefly bridge the Mediterranean and South Asian worlds. The episode demonstrates coinage's capacity to travel as both a practical monetary technology and a vehicle of cultural and political symbolism, with conquering and trading powers alike adapting the visual language of coins to assert legitimacy among newly incorporated or newly contacted populations.	India, Seleucid Empire
~323 BC	Metallic coin	Coinage	Following the death of Alexander the Great, the custom becomes established of depicting the head of the sovereign on coins, serving less as a guarantee of weight and fineness than as an act of personal glorification by the ruler. The practice carries an inherent risk of reversal: Suetonius, the Roman biographer and historian, records that after the death of Caligula, the third Roman emperor, his coinage is called in and melted down so that not only his name but his features might be erased from public memory. The sovereign portrait on coinage thus becomes a recurring instrument of both political legitimacy and posthumous condemnation across ancient and medieval states.	Ancient Greece, Roman Empire
~300 BCE	Metallic coin	Coinage	The English word "money" derives from the Latin moneta, the name given to the Roman goddess Juno Moneta, at or near whose temple on the Capitoline Hill the Romans first begin minting coins around 300 BCE. The association between the mint and the goddess's temple establishes a linguistic legacy that outlives the Roman Empire itself: the word for currency in English and many other European languages traces directly back to this single physical location and religious dedication, entering English in the 14th century. The Roman state's choice to house its minting operation within a sacred precinct reflects the broader ancient pattern — seen also in Mesopotamian temple-granaries and in the religious sanction enjoyed by medieval Italian banking houses — of monetary institutions deriving legitimacy and protection from association with religious authority before the emergence of purely secular state control over currency.	Rome, Roman Republic
211 BCE	Metallic coin	Coinage	The Roman Republic introduces the denarius, a silver coin that becomes the dominant currency of the Mediterranean world for the following five centuries. Struck at a standard weight of approximately 4.5 grams of silver, the denarius provides the Roman economy with a reliable and widely accepted medium of exchange that facilitates trade across an expanding empire stretching from Iberian Peninsula to Mesopotamia. The coin's longevity and geographic reach make it one of the most successful monetary instruments of antiquity; its name survives in the currencies of numerous successor states — the dinar of the Islamic world, the penny of medieval England, and the denaro of Italy all derive from it. The progressive debasement of the denarius by successive emperors from the late second century onward, reducing its silver content from near purity to a few percent, provides one of antiquity's most extensively documented case studies in the relationship between currency debasement, inflation, and imperial decline.	Roman Republic, Mediterranean
312 CE	Metallic coin	Coinage	Constantine the Great introduces the gold solidus (coin) shortly after his ascension to power, fixing it at 1/72 of a pound of gold — approximately 4.5 grams — and establishing a standard that holds remarkably steady for over seven centuries. The coin, known in Western Europe as the bezant, comes to dominate trade across the Byzantine Empire, Europe, the Levant, and the Near East, accumulating in hoards as far afield as the Baltic, Scandinavia, France, and Russia; the consistency of its gold purity, maintained until debasement begins in the 1030s under Romanos III Argyros, makes it the most trusted international currency of the medieval world, frequently likened to the dollar of its era. Byzantine gold coinage also exerts lasting typological influence, shaping the design of early Arab-Sasanian gold dinars and the coinage of Italy and Gaul, while its eventual displacement by the Venetian ducat in the 14th century illustrates the recurring pattern by which even the most durable currencies are eventually supplanted once the political power sustaining them weakens.	Turkey (Byzantine Empire, Constantinople)
7th–12th century	Bank money	Banking	During the Islamic Golden Age, a vigorous monetary economy develops across the medieval Islamic world on the basis of the expanding circulation of a stable high-value currency — the dinar — whose reliability facilitates long-distance trade from the Iberian Peninsula to Central Asia. Muslim economists, traders, and merchants introduce innovations that anticipate many features of modern finance: the earliest systematic uses of Credit (finance), cheques, promissory notes, savings accounts, transaction accounts, lending, trust law, exchange rates, and the transfer of credit and debt across long distances without physical movement of coin. Banking institutions for loans and deposits emerge as a structural feature of the Islamic commercial world, providing the organizational infrastructure for trade networks that span three continents. The Islamic monetary system demonstrates that a stable currency combined with sophisticated credit instruments can sustain commercial expansion far beyond what metallic coin circulation alone would permit.	Islamic world, Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia
793–794 CE	Metallic coin	Coinage	Charlemagne carries out a sweeping currency reform around 793–794, defining a new Carolingian pound (libra) of silver significantly heavier than the old Roman pound and introducing a new silver coin, the denier, of which 240 make up one pound of pure silver. A unit of account, the solidus, is introduced for ease of reckoning so that one solidus equals twelve deniers, establishing the tripartite libra-solidus-denarius accounting system (1:20:240) that subsequently dominates European money for centuries, surviving in England as the pound-shilling-penny relationship until 1971 and in France as the livre, sol, and denier until the Revolution. For three centuries following the reform the silver penny is the only coin minted in much of Europe, with shillings and pounds remaining "ghost monies" — convenient accounting shorthand rather than actual circulating coins. The reform replaces the patchwork of gold tremisses, Byzantine-influenced coinages, and irregular regional currencies that had proliferated since the fall of Rome, with nearly one hundred mints identified under Carolingian administration and the system spreading through conquest and imitation to England, where King Offa of Mercia issues closely modeled silver pennies in the 780s.	France (Carolingian Empire, Francia)
960 CE	Commodity money	Commodity money	According to a travelogue of Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, an Andalusi traveler and chronicler, small pieces of cloth are used as a means of trade in Prague, with these cloths carrying a set exchange rate against silver. The Prague cloth currency illustrates a recurring pattern in medieval European monetary history: in regions where coined metal remains scarce, durable and divisible commodities — textiles, in this case — emerge as a parallel medium of exchange pegged to the value of the dominant metal standard. The episode is one of the earliest documented instances of a textile-based currency operating alongside, rather than independently of, a metallic standard, anticipating the later development of representative money in which a non-metallic token derives its value from a fixed convertibility relationship to silver or gold.	Prague, Bohemia
997–1022 CE	Paper money	Currency issue	During the reign of Emperor Zhenzong of the Song dynasty, China introduces what is widely considered the first true paper money, made from the bark of mulberry trees and issued under imperial authority. The innovation builds on an earlier merchant practice of exchanging heavy copper coins for promissory receipts, but under Zhenzong the state takes a more active role in standardizing and backing the notes, transforming a commercial convenience into an instrument of sovereign monetary policy. The use of mulberry bark paper — a material already associated with Chinese papermaking traditions stretching back centuries — gives the currency a physical basis distinct from both metal and shell, establishing that the material of money need not carry intrinsic value so long as it commands institutional backing and public trust. By the late 18th and early 19th centuries paper money spreads from China to other parts of the world, though the bulk of early Western paper currency serves as promissory notes — promises to pay specified amounts of gold or silver — rather than fiat instruments, reflecting the persistent Western assumption that paper money requires metallic backing to be credible.	China, Song dynasty
~1100 CE	Commodity money	Currency issue	During one of the recurrent gold shortages of the Middle Ages, Henry I of England begins using tally sticks as money, with which his subjects can pay taxes. Squared hazelwood tallies, most commonly about eight inches long, are notched to indicate the amount paid and then split so that the notches appear on both pieces — the tally stick, held by the king as tax money, and the foil, held by the subject as a receipt. When tallies are used to register loans to King John around 1200 CE, the result is that the money lent is in effect doubled: the king can spend the value of the stock he holds, while his subject, holding a foil of the same value, can also trade his foil for other goods — an early and unintentional demonstration of the money-multiplying effect of credit instruments that would later become the foundational mechanism of fractional reserve banking. Tally sticks remain in use in England until 1826, making them one of the longest-lived monetary instruments in English history; when the obsolete tallies are finally burned in the furnaces of the Palace of Westminster in 1834, the fire gets out of control and burns the Houses of Parliament to the ground — a fitting if accidental monument to their abolition.	England
~1150 CE	Paper money	Currency issue	Around 1150, the Knights Templar, a military order founded to protect pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land, begins issuing notes to pilgrims as an early form of traveler's cheque. Pilgrims deposit valuables with a local Templar preceptory before embarking for the Holy Land and receive a document indicating the value of their deposit; upon arrival they use that document to receive funds of equal value from the treasury of the Templar order. The system allows travelers to cross a continent without carrying physical gold or silver vulnerable to theft along the journey, representing one of the earliest documented uses of a paper instrument functioning as a transferable claim on value held elsewhere — a conceptual precursor to the letter of credit and the modern bank transfer, achieved through the trust commanded by a powerful and geographically dispersed religious-military institution rather than through state authority.	Holy Land, Europe
10th–13th century	Paper money	Currency issue	In premodern China, the need for a medium of exchange less physically cumbersome than large quantities of copper coins leads to the gradual introduction of jiaozi during the late Tang dynasty (618–907) and into the Song dynasty (960–1279). The process begins as merchants exchange heavy coinage for promissory notes issued as receipts of deposit by wholesalers' shops, valid for temporary use in small regional territories; in the 10th century the Song dynasty government begins circulating these notes in its monopolized salt industry, and the government eventually takes over the issuing shops to produce state-issued currency. It is not until the mid-13th century that a standard and uniform government issue of paper money becomes an acceptable nationwide currency, with the already widespread technologies of woodblock printing and Bi Sheng's movable type printing providing the impetus for mass production. The Song dynasty jiaozi represents the earliest government-issued paper money in world history, predating European paper currency by several centuries and establishing the conceptual template — notes backed by government authority rather than intrinsic commodity value — that all subsequent paper monetary systems follow.	China, Song dynasty
~13th century	Bank money	Banking	Banking has a substantial existence in Roman Empire times before declining during the Middle Ages as trade becomes more hazardous and lending comes into conflict with religious prohibitions on usury. With the Renaissance it revives as trade recovers and religious scruples yield to normal fashion and pecuniary advantage, with its decline and revival belonging to Italy — no bankers alone, not even the Rothschild family or J. P. Morgan, the American financier and banker who dominates Wall Street at the turn of the twentieth century, equaling the Medici in grandeur. The banking houses of Republic of Venice and Republic of Genoa, operating under the sanction of the Holy See, establish the institutional foundations from which all subsequent European banking descends, demonstrating that the revival of commerce and the revival of credit are inseparable historical processes.	Italy, Venice, Genoa
1493	Metallic coin	Inflation	Following the voyages of Christopher Columbus and the subsequent Spanish conquest of the Americas of Spanish America, a vast flow of precious metal — primarily silver — moves from the Americas to Europe, set in motion by discovery and conquest of lands whose people do not feel the principal consequences of the transfer. The result is a huge rise in prices across Europe, representing one of the earliest documented cases of inflation driven by an increase in the money supply rather than by productive expansion. The episode establishes for later monetary economists the foundational insight that the quantity of money in circulation, not merely its metallic composition, determines its purchasing power.	Spanish America, Europe
1500–1682	Metallic coin	Inflation	The influx of precious metals from the Americas produces a sustained Price Revolution across Europe, with price increases occurring first in Spain where the metals arrive before spreading through trade and smuggling to France, the Low Countries, and England. In Andalusia, prices rise perhaps fivefold between 1500 and 1600. In England, taking pre-Christopher Columbus prices of the late fifteenth century as an index of 100, prices reach roughly 250 by the last decade of the sixteenth century and approximately 350 by the decade of 1673–1682 — a three-and-a-half-fold increase — before leveling off and subsiding after 1680. The episode constitutes one of the earliest empirically documented cases of monetary inflation driven by expansion of the money supply, and establishes the analytical foundation for the later quantity theory of money, demonstrating that the purchasing power of metallic currency depends not on its intrinsic composition but on its abundance relative to available goods.	Spain, Andalusia, France, Low Countries, England
1531	Metallic coin	Silver mining	The great silver mines of San Luis Potosí, Guanajuato, and other rich deposits in New Spain and Peru become the primary source of American treasure flowing to Spain, with silver constituting no less than 85 percent of the total by weight during the decade 1531–1540 and never less than 97 percent between 1561 and 1570. The bullion arrives routinely and safely in Spain despite the threat of piracy, with losses remaining slight until the 1630s, after which the richest ore having been exploited, exports of silver decline. The scale and regularity of this transfer represents the largest peacetime intercontinental movement of monetary metal in history to that point, fundamentally altering the European money supply and demonstrating that the purchasing power of metallic currency is inseparable from the conditions of its production.	New Spain, Peru, Spain
1558	Metallic coin	Monetary theory	Thomas Gresham, financial agent to the English crown, formulates the enduring observation that bad money always drives out good — later codified as Gresham's law — noting that when coins of differing metal content circulate at the same face value, people hoard the better coins and spend the debased ones. The principle reflects a structural feature of metallic currency systems in which debasement by rulers or clipping by private individuals creates two effective currencies at the same nominal value, with the worse invariably prevailing in circulation. Gresham's law remains one of the most frequently cited propositions in monetary economics, later extended by economists to describe analogous dynamics in language, culture, and information markets.	England
1565	Metallic coin	Coinage	The Knights Hospitaller stamp the motto Non Aes, sed Fides — "Not the Metal, but Trust" — on their coins in 1565, offering one of the most explicit premodern articulations of the principle that money functions as a technology of trust rather than as an object whose value resides in its physical substance. The inscription anticipates by centuries the analytical insight that coins are tokens recording an underlying system of credit and trust rather than intrinsically valuable commodities in their own right, a distinction obscured for most of monetary history by the practical necessity of using precious metal to manufacture a token that is portable, durable, and difficult to counterfeit. The Knights' choice to make this philosophical claim explicit on the coinage of a sovereign military-religious order — rather than leaving it implicit, as in most contemporary European currencies — reflects their unusual constitutional position as a polity whose authority rests on religious and chivalric legitimacy rather than territorial conquest or hereditary succession.	Malta
1606	Metallic coin	Coinage	A manual for money changers issued by the Dutch Republic in 1606 lists 341 silver and 505 gold coins then in circulation, reflecting the chaotic diversity of debased coinage reaching Amsterdam after a century of American silver flows. Within the Dutch Republic no fewer than fourteen mints are simultaneously producing money, creating strong incentives to substitute plausibility for quality in coin production. The proliferation of debased and counterfeit coins makes weighing obligatory for every mercantile transaction, yet the scales themselves are widely suspected of manipulation, generating a crisis of monetary trust that directly motivates the founding of the Amsterdam Exchange Bank three years later as a public institutional remedy.	Dutch Republic, Amsterdam
1609	Metallic coin	Banking	The Amsterdam Exchange Bank establishes the Amsterdam Exchange Bank, one of the most pervasively influential steps in the history of money, linking the great trade of Amsterdam to the emerging history of banking and providing a model for sound deposit banking that influences financial institutions across Europe for more than a century. The bank is founded partly in response to the chronic problem of adulterated, clipped, filed, sweated, and trimmed coins in circulation, and introduces the discipline of accepting deposits at established weight rather than face value. The Amsterdam Exchange Bank becomes a template for the later development of central banking and the separation of money's store-of-value function from its means-of-exchange function.	Amsterdam, Dutch Republic
1641	Commodity money	Currency issue	In the early colonial settlements of New England through Virginia, the shortage of hard coin forces colonists to use substitutes for metal, with tobacco serving as money in the southern colonies and wampum — shell beads used by Indigenous peoples of the Americas — becoming the accepted small coinage across the region. In Massachusetts in 1641 wampum is made legal tender at the rate of six shells to the penny, though it begins to lose favor within a generation or two as first being redeemed in two denominations and then being subject to questions of acceptability. The wampum system, in effect, makes the Indigenous peoples of New England the central bankers of the colonial monetary system, with beaver pelts serving alongside as a higher-denomination currency — illustrating that monetary improvisation in conditions of coin shortage inevitably elevates whatever commodity commands broad local trust to the function of money.	Massachusetts, Virginia, Colonial America
1642	Commodity money	Currency issue	Tobacco comes into use as money in Virginia a dozen years after the first permanent settlement in Jamestown in 1607, and in 1642 is made legal tender by the General Assembly of the colony by the interestingly inverse device of outlawing contracts that call for payment in gold or silver. The use of tobacco as money survives in Virginia for nearly two centuries and in Maryland for a century and a half — in both cases until the Constitution of the United States makes money the concern solely of the Federal government. Measured against the gold standard, which by common calculation lasts from 1879 until its final attenuation by Richard Nixon in 1971, tobacco though more confined as to region has nearly twice as long a run as gold, establishing it as one of the most durable commodity money systems in American history.	Virginia, Maryland, Colonial America
1661	Paper money	Currency issue	Sweden, rich in copper but burdened by the low value of that metal which necessitates extraordinarily large and heavy coins often weighing several kilograms, becomes the first country in Europe to introduce paper currency on a regular basis in 1661. The practical impossibility of conducting ordinary commerce with copper plates of such unwieldy dimensions creates an irresistible incentive to substitute paper receipts, and the Stockholm Banco, founded by Johan Palmstruch, a Latvian-born merchant and financier, issues the first European banknotes — known as kreditivsedlar — redeemable against the copper held in deposit. The experiment ends badly: Palmstruch issues more notes than the bank holds in copper reserves, producing one of the earliest documented cases of European bank-note overissue and inflation, and he is subsequently sentenced to death, later commuted, for the resulting financial losses. The Swedish episode establishes both the promise and the structural danger of paper money — its convenience is undeniable, but the temptation to issue beyond reserves proves as irresistible in Stockholm as it would later prove in Paris, Philadelphia, and Richmond.	Sweden, Stockholm
1666	Commodity money	Monetary policy	From the earliest days of the Colony of Virginia and Province of Maryland settlements, colonial governments are concerned with limiting tobacco production to sustain its purchasing power, and in 1666 a treaty is negotiated among Virginia, Maryland, and Province of Carolina agreeing to a one-year suspension of tobacco production. In 1683 the failure of a similar effort sends bands roaming the countryside destroying tobacco plants and leading the Virginia Assembly to decree that if such operations are conducted by eight or more marauders, the participants should be adjudged guilty of treason and suffer death. The overproduction of farm products, their often inelastic demand, and the resulting disastrous prices regularly make it hard for farmers to meet interest or payments on mortgages — illustrating the structural defect of commodity money whose supply is determined by individual producers rather than monetary authority, making chronic overproduction and currency depreciation an inherent feature of the tobacco money system.	Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, Colonial America
1683	Bank money	Banking	The Amsterdam Exchange Bank introduces an early form of fiat money in 1683, departing from its founding principle of crediting depositors strictly according to the weight and fineness of metal deposited. The shift represents a significant evolution in the bank's monetary function: rather than serving purely as a custodian translating physical coin into a more convenient unit of account, the bank begins to extend credit beyond what is strictly backed by metal in its vaults — anticipating by more than a century the practice of fractional convertibility that becomes standard among modern central banks. The innovation, occurring within the institution that had spent the preceding seven decades building a reputation for unimpeachable rectitude, illustrates how even the most conservative monetary authorities are eventually drawn toward credit creation once the practical advantages of doing so become apparent, planting the seed of the same vulnerability that contributes to the bank's eventual collapse in 1819.	Amsterdam, Dutch Republic
1685	Paper money	Currency issue	In New France, now part of Canada, the colonial authorities find themselves seriously short of money after a military expedition against the Iroquois goes badly and tax revenues fall, reducing government reserves at a moment when delaying payment to soldiers risks mutiny. Jacques de Meulles, the Intendant of Finance, conceives an ingenious ad hoc solution: he confiscates all the playing cards in the colony, has them cut into pieces, writes denominations on the pieces, signs them, and issues them to the soldiers as pay in lieu of gold and silver. Because of the colony's chronic shortage of money of all types, the cards are accepted readily by merchants and the public and circulate freely at face value; the first issue occurs in June 1685 and is redeemed three months later, though shortages of coinage reoccur and more issues of card money are made in subsequent years. The episode illustrates that the line between an improvised wartime expedient and a durable monetary instrument is thinner than commonly assumed: the value of money rests not on the intrinsic properties of its physical substrate but on the willingness of a community to accept and circulate the token, however improvised its origin.	New France, Canada
1690	Paper money	Currency issue	The first issue of paper money in the Americas is by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1690, described as "not only the origin of paper money in America but also in the British Empire, and almost in the Christian world." It is occasioned, as noted by William Phips, a man whose own fortune and position had been founded on the gold and silver retrieved from a wrecked Spanish galleon near the shores of what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic — who leads an expedition of Massachusetts irregulars against Quebec and, the loot from the fall of Quebec not being available to pay his troops, resorts to paper. The issue establishes the template for government paper money in the Americas: military necessity overcoming the absence of metallic reserves, with the notes initially accepted on the promise of future tax revenues and ultimate redemption in coin.	Massachusetts Bay Colony, Colonial America
1694	Bank money	Banking	The Bank of England is founded in 1694 when financial need overcomes all objections, including those of Tories who hold that banks are republican by nature. Its founder, William Paterson (banker), a Scottish financier and fellow countryman from the Scottish Lowlands of John Law (economist), becomes possessed in the last years of the seventeenth century of the idea of a great colony strategically situated on the Isthmus of Panama. Finding the Regent in need of funds following Louis XIV, the long-reigning French king, Paterson encounters the same monarch as Law and likewise offers a banking solution: a company organized under a royal charter with a capital of £1,200,000, the whole sum to be lent to William III of England, the Dutch-born king of England, with the government's promise to pay serving as security for a note issue of the same amount. The notes are then loaned out to worthy private borrowers, with interest earned both on the loans to the government and on the loans to private borrowers — the wonder of banking rendered institutional and permanent for the first time in English history.	England
17th–18th century	Bank money	Banking	The Amsterdam Exchange Bank develops a compromising relationship with the Dutch East India Company, whose directors and the mayor and members of the Senate of the City of Amsterdam are often the same men. In the seventeenth century the Company is an exceedingly solid enterprise, and the Bank begins providing short-run accommodation loans out of depositors' funds to outfit its ships — a small step toward what becomes the most orthodox function of the modern commercial bank. As the East India Company's fortunes decline in the eighteenth century and the war with England in 1780 brings heavy losses of ships and cargoes, the Bank becomes slower to pay, the City government begins hitting the Bank for loans, and depositors can no longer all be satisfied simultaneously. Merchants who had previously accepted bank deposits at a premium over debased coin now take them only at a discount, and the Bank begins limiting coin withdrawals — revealing that the institution once celebrated for rectitude has replicated the very abuses it was founded to prevent.	Amsterdam, Dutch Republic
1716	Paper money	Banking	John Law (economist), a Scotsman with credentials that some must even then have thought less than reassuring, arrives in France in 1716 with the support of other circumstances and proceeds to connect his name with the Equity Funding Corporation of America of America, showing what a bank could do with and to money. His operations have a style and panache that would not have been manifested in more prosaic financial precincts, and he possesses the Midas touch — but truly, for his euphoria and awakening span a full two hundred and fifty years to connect with Bernard Cornfeld and later financial geniuses. As banking develops from the seventeenth century onward, cycles of euphoria and panic recur with rough periodicity, taking roughly the time of one generation to die in disrepute before being replaced by new craftsmen who cause the gullible to believe again — the natural counterpart of earlier euphoria and the mirror image of the depression or panic that follows the miracle of money's sudden erasure from existence.	France
1719	Paper money	Currency issue	John Law (economist)'s bank, having opened branches in Lyon, La Rochelle, Tours, Amiens, and Orléans, is converted into a publicly chartered company — the Banque Royale — backed by the French state. To replenish the reserves backing its growing volume of notes, Law revives his original land bank idea by creating the Mississippi Company (Compagnie d'Occident) to exploit and bring to France the vast gold deposits which Louisiana is thought to have in its subsoil. In early 1719 the Mississippi Company, later the Company of the Indies, is granted exclusive trading privileges in India, China, and the South Seas, and subsequently receives the tobacco monopoly, the right to coin money, and the tax farm — assembling a primeval conglomerate whose stock becomes the object of the most intense speculative mania yet seen in European financial history.	France, Louisiana
1720	Paper money	Currency crisis	Persuaded by his own success, John Law (economist) turns his attention to broader economic and social reforms, systematically reducing tolls on grain trade, freeing the peasants from uncultivated land tariffs, and attempting to finance public works and industry with loans and resulting notes — moves that alarm the clergy and ennoble him by a grateful sovereign as Controller-General of France. He cannot, however, be identified with New Orleans so he becomes the first, and as yet the only, Duc d'Arkansas. On January 5, 1720, the Prince de Conti, offended by his inability to buy stock at a price he considers right, sends a bunch of notes to the Banque Royale to be redeemed in hard currency — the end is very near. In 1720 the notes, needless to say, are the problem: three wagons are sent to carry back the sizable amount of silver coin the Prince has ordered, a gesture that signals the beginning of the run that destroys the system.	France, Paris
1720	Paper money	Speculation	The South Sea Company, after some years of routine existence, comes forward in 1720 with a proposal to take over the government debt in return for various concessions including trading privileges to the Spanish colonies — privileges requiring a highly improbable treaty with Spain. The Bank of England bids strenuously against the South Sea Company for the public debt but is completely outdone by the latter's generosity, facilitated by the bribery of members of Parliament of the United Kingdom and the government. In the same year that John Law (economist)'s operations reach their climax across the Channel, a wild speculation in South Sea Company stock develops in England alongside numerous other company promotions — including one for a wheel for perpetual motion, one for repairing and rebuilding parsonage and vicarage houses, and the immortal company "for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is." All eventually pass into nothing, but the Bank of England's reputation for prudence is greatly enhanced by its largely accidental escape, leaving France suspicious of paper money and Englishmen suspicious of joint-stock company.	England, London
1720	Paper money	Currency crisis	As the Mississippi bubble collapses, John Law (economist) is reduced to acting out a deeper insight: with others busy getting Law's paper into metal and the metal into Vermont, England, and Holland, a jobber named Law procures a farmer's cart and, covered with hay and cow-dung, disguised as a peasant, packs a million of livre in gold and silver coin into it and flees France — the most eloquent possible commentary on the relative merits of metallic and paper money. The collapse of Law's system discredits paper money in France for nearly a century, establishing a deep cultural aversion to banknotes that persists through the French Revolution and shapes French monetary conservatism well into the nineteenth century.	France
1720	Paper money	Currency crisis	As confidence in the Banque Royale collapses, the French authorities attempt to restore it through theatrical deception: a thousand or more mendicants from the Paris slums are equipped with shovels and tools and marched through the streets as though on their way to Louisiana to mine gold, signaling to noteholders that gold would soon pour back into the bank. A large proportion escape on the way to the ships, sell their tools, and return to their old haunts — and when Paris learns it has mendicants rather than miners, the unsettling effect on investors and noteholders of the Banque Royale accelerates the crisis. Payment of specie in return for notes is restricted, and Law in his official capacity forbids the possession of gold and silver except in small quantities, extending the prohibition to jewelry, with informers invited to share in any hoards they report. On one day in July 1720 the crowd at the Banque Royale is so great that fifteen people are reportedly squeezed to death — Law, no longer a financial genius but a sizable fragment of a Paris mob, flees.	France, Paris
1727	Paper money	Currency issue	As a remedy to the chronic debasement of tobacco currency through low-quality leaf — Gresham's law operating with exceptional power as no one passes on good tobacco when scraps and stems are available instead — public warehouses are established as the counterpart of the Amsterdam Exchange Bank, where tobacco is weighed, graded, and certificates representing a defined quality and quantity are issued and passed into circulation. In 1727 tobacco certificates become full legal tender in Virginia and continue to serve until nearly the end of the century, so close being the association between tobacco and money that the paper currency of New England is influenced by the model — representing one of the earliest American experiments in warehouse receipts functioning as paper money backed by a defined commodity.	Virginia, Maryland, Colonial America
1729	Paper money	Monetary theory	Benjamin Franklin, the most intelligent political man in the colonies and the energetic supporter of paper money, publishes in 1729 his A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, a brief on behalf of paper currency, and in ensuing years aids the cause in an even more practical way: in 1736 Pennsylvania Gazette, of which Franklin is printer, makes an irregular appearance because its printer is busy printing Pennsylvania paper money, labouring for the publick Good. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, expanding university faculties, an increased interest in the past, and a pressing need for scholarly research lead paper money to become an article of doctoral theses and a greatly expanded exploration of colonial economics among historians and economists — the monetary experiments of Pennsylvania and its neighbors being by no means an unconsidered reaction to circumstance but extensively debated and contested in their own time.	Pennsylvania, Colonial America
1741	Bank money	Banking	The most controversial colonial banking innovation is the Land Bank Manufactory Scheme of Massachusetts, which possibly owes something to the ideas of John Law (economist): the colony authorized the issue of bank notes of nominal interest to subscribers to its capital stock, the notes to be secured on the real property of the stockholders, with the same notes usable to repay the loan that their issue had incurred. This pool could also be used to purchase the colony's produce. The dispute is carried to London and in 1741 the Bubble Act — directed at British and associated promotions and which outlawed joint-stock companies not specifically authorized — is declared to apply to the colonies, killing the Land Bank as an outrageous exercise in ex post facto legislation, one that is perhaps the most flagrant prohibition against such laws in colonial history. It effectively ends the colonial banks, though it solidifies colonial grievance against British monetary authority in the decade before the American Revolution.	Massachusetts, Colonial America, Britain
1751	Paper money	Monetary policy	The colonial monetary experiments arouse no admiration in the mother country, being taken as proof of the abandoned tendencies of the colonists, and in 1751 Parliament of Great Britain forbids the issue of further paper money in New England, extending the ban to the rest of the colonies thirteen years later. A tactless exception is made for paper issued for the King's purposes — that is to say, for war. In 1766 Benjamin Franklin carries his case for paper money to the House of Commons in person in an eloquent effort that proves without effect. The ban becomes a serious source of tension between Britain and the colonies, less celebrated than it deserves as a cause of the American Revolution, establishing the principle — later repeatedly tested — that a distant monetary authority imposing deflationary constraints on a debtor population courts political rebellion.	New England, Colonial America, Britain
1760–1771	Paper money	Currency crisis	As the finances of the French government deteriorate under the pressure of European wars, financial assistance to the colony declines and the colonial authorities in New France rely increasingly on playing card money; by 1757 the government has discontinued all payments in coin, paying instead in paper. In an application of Gresham's law, people hoard gold and silver and use paper money instead, and the costs of the Seven Years' War produce rapid hyperinflation in New France. After the British conquest in 1760 the paper money becomes almost worthless, though business does not end, as gold and silver that had been hoarded comes back into circulation. By the Treaty of Paris (1763), the French government agrees to convert the outstanding card money into debentures, but with the French government essentially bankrupt, these bonds default and by 1771 are worthless — a complete monetary collapse that demonstrates how a paper currency's value, sustained for seventy-five years by colonial necessity and habitual acceptance, evaporates entirely once political conquest severs it from its issuing sovereign.	New France, Canada
1775–1779	Paper money	Currency issue	With independence rendering the Parliamentary ban on colonial paper money inoperative, the Continental Congress — without direct powers of taxation — authorizes note issues to finance the American Revolutionary War, its first acts including authorizing a note issue while more states authorize more notes in parallel. Between June 1775 and November 1779 there are forty-two currency issues by the Continental Congress with a total face value of $241,600,000; in the same years the states issue another $209,500,000 in domestic borrowing, much of it rendered in the notes just mentioned and brought in less than $100,000,000 in real value. Taxes levied in consequence of requisitions on the states produce only a few millions of dollars, reflecting the well-known colonial distaste for taxation and leaving paper money as the overwhelming instrument by which the Revolution is financed — establishing from the founding moment the pattern of war finance through currency creation that recurs across American history.	United States, Continental America
1776–1777	Paper money	Inflation	The Continental currency depreciates at an accelerating rate, with Congress taking steps to stem the decay in 1776 and prices rising slowly at first then increasing rapidly in 1777 — far in excess of any corresponding increase in trade, with Continental and state issues overwhelming the economy. Since the Revolution is paid for overwhelmingly with paper money, the foreign loans from Spain, France, and the Dutch Republic are more symbolic than real, amounting to little over a million dollars from Spain and a few hundred thousand from France after the victory. Congress resolves in 1776 that "any person who shall hereafter be so lost to all virtue and regard for his country as to refuse said Bills in payment or intercourse with the inhabitants of these Colonies shall be deemed, published and treated as an enemy in this country" — a measure whose ferocity reflects the structural impossibility of maintaining a paper currency's value by decree alone when supply vastly exceeds the economy's absorptive capacity.	United States
1780	Bank money	Banking	When Lord George Gordon leads his mob through London during the Gordon Riots in 1780, the Bank of England is a principal target, signifying its identification with the Establishment and with the Catholic Relief Acts that provoke the riots. While the Catholic districts of London are pillaged, the authorities are slow to react, but when the siege of the Bank begins it is thought more serious — troops intervene, and ever since soldiers have been sent to guard the Bank by night. The episode illustrates how thoroughly the Bank has become identified with the institutional order of England within six decades of its founding.	England, London
1787	Fiat currency	Monetary policy	The Constitution of the United States restricts the right of coinage to the Federal government, expressly forbids the states from issuing paper money, and, in a far less convenient limitation, also forbids the national government to issue paper money as well. A motion to strike the clause forbidding the government "to emit bills on the credit of the United States" is defeated, and the prohibition, specifically carried by the Constitutional Convention of 1787, is taken as a lesson on the flexibility of the document when the urgencies of money are involved. The {{w|United States Secretary of the Treasury|Constitutional Gazette]] in the 1812–1814 war sees the Treasury informally issuing Treasury notes bearing interest at 5.4 percent and of some denominations small enough to circulate as money — bearing no interest at all and establishing the pattern of wartime resort to government paper that the Constitution's framers had sought to prevent.	United States
1789	Paper money	Currency issue	The ingenuity of the French Revolutionary assignats lies in the commodity into which they can be exchanged and which gives them value: not gold and silver, unavailable in plausible quantity and principally possessed by those at whom the Revolution is directed, but land — the very thing the Revolution is making available. The initial resource is the land not of the aristocracy but of the Catholic Church in France, estimated at a fifth of all the land in France in 1789, made available as the Estates-General has been summoned in consequence of terrible fiscal straits with no more borrowing possible and no central bank to take up loans. The Third Estate can scarcely be expected to vote new or heavier levies, making land-backed paper the only viable instrument of revolutionary finance — an innovation that ties the currency's value to the progress of the Revolution itself and makes inflation and political radicalism structurally interdependent.	France, Paris
1790	Bank money	Banking	Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, in addition to assuming the debts of the states and the Continental Congress, makes a gesture toward the Continental currency by redeeming them from those holding them at the comparatively generous rate of one cent of hard money to the dollar. In response to another Hamilton recommendation, a bank is established in Philadelphia — the First Bank of the United States — dealing in silver and laying the institutional foundation for the American banking system under Federal auspices.	United States, Philadelphia
1790–1796	Paper money	Inflation	The large assignat issue of 1790 is followed by others, especially after war breaks out in 1792, and prices denominated in assignats rise sharply while their rate of exchange for gold and silver declines. Under the National Convention and the management of Lazare Carnot in 1793 and 1794 there is a period of stability, with the supply of assignats curtailed by the righteous device of repudiating those issued under the king — in these years they retain a value of around 50 percent of face amount when exchanged for gold or silver. Soon, however, need asserts itself and more are printed; William Pitt the Younger, after 1793, allows the royalist émigrés to manufacture assignats for export to France in hopes of hastening the decay. In the end the French presses print one day to supply the needs of the next, the French Directory halts the exchange of the now nearly worthless paper for good real estate, creditors are protected from having their debts paid in assignats (saving them from the ignominy of having to hide out from their debtors as in America), and France goes off the land standard — the assignat experiment collapsing into the mandats territoriaux, an entitlement to land that fares no better.	France
1791	Bank money	Banking	The First Bank of the United States is chartered for twenty years with an authorized capital of $10 million, of which the Federal government subscribes $2 million and no individual can hold more than a thousand of the twenty-five thousand shares, with foreigners able to own shares but not vote them. When subscription books open in July 1791 all is immediately taken up and a sharp speculation in rights to buy the stock follows, though thrifty participants confine themselves to a modest down payment and the bank begins operations on around $675,000 in hard cash. By its own standards the bank is a marked success: in the next twenty years, with its eight branches, it serves as a place of deposit for government funds, as the instrument for transferring funds across the country, in making public disbursements, as a source of government loans, and as a source of private credit, with notes exchangeable for gold or silver circulating at par and well regarded by the public. In 1805 other banks in the eastern seaboard states number an estimated seventy-five, with the United States Bank enforcing a substantial restraint on their note issues.	United States, Philadelphia
1797	Bank money	Currency crisis	At the end of the eighteenth century Kingdom of Great Britain is at war on two fronts — with its American Revolution and then with French Revolutionary Wars, the French general who rises to become emperor — and the new Republic of France has its usual consequences: money is needed for subsidies to allies, to pay troops in the field, and for the William Pitt the Younger government's conducive policy of conscripting from more abundant French manpower. Pitt proves reckless in his demands on the Bank of England for loans, levies an income tax (also called a property tax), and devises a lottery — yet the need continues. In the closing years of the century the Bank's reserves fall low and there are occasional runs; in 1797, under conditions of great tension, the Bank suspends the thought that its notes should be redeemable in gold and silver on demand — the prompt disappearance of silver coins and the keeping of gold demonstrates that Gresham's law operates as reliably as ever: people passed on the notes and kept the metal.	Kingdom of Great Britain
1800	Bank money	Banking	In 1800 the lingering suspicions of the French of banking institutions, having yielded to the financial needs of Napoleon, produce the Banque de France, which in the ensuing century develops in rough parallel with the Bank of England. Other countries acquire similar institutions soon after, establishing a network of European central banks that collectively come to police and protect the convertibility of currency into gold across the industrializing world.	France, Paris
1810	Bank money	Monetary policy	With the Bank of England suspending gold redemption from 1797 onward, government loans and resulting note issues continue to increase, and prices rise accordingly — wheat, which is six shillings ninepence a bushel at Michaelmas 1797, rises to above eleven shillings in 1799 and to sixteen shillings the following year, while the price of uncoined gold bullion advances substantially in the same period. In 1810 the House of Commons impanels the Bullion Committee to inquire into the matter, its principal task being to determine whether Bank of England notes have fallen in value or the price of gold has risen — different phrasings of the same question. The committee deliberates and finds against the notes, concluding that gold has increased in price because of an overissue of the still-irredeemable Bank of England notes, and proposes that after a two-year period convertibility be restored — establishing one of the earliest formal parliamentary inquiries into the relationship between note issue and inflation, and vindicating the position long argued by David Ricardo, the English economist and champion of sound money.	England, London
1811	Bank money	Banking	The charter of the First Bank of the United States comes up for renewal in 1811 amid fierce political opposition: Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. President, has been opposed to the Bank, as are most of his Cabinet members, and James Madison, the fourth U.S. President who succeeds him in 1809, has earlier argued the Bank unconstitutional. In 1810 the United States House of Representatives votes 73–35 for renewal; Congress adjourns and opponents conduct urgent educational work on wavering legislators; on reconvening the Senate produces a 17–17 tie. Albert Gallatin, the Swiss-born Secretary of the Treasury, supports the Bank and presses for renewal, but when the Senate ties, George Clinton casts his vote against — and the First Bank of the United States loses its charter, leaving the country without a central banking institution on the eve of the War of 1812.	United States
1811–1817	Paper money	Banking	Free from the discipline of the First Bank of the United States and encouraged by the War of 1812 and the postwar boom, the number of state banks multiplies from 88 in 1811 to 208 in 1815, with note issues increasing from an estimated $45 million in 1812 to $100 million in 1817, the biggest expansion occurring in the new country in the Appalachian Mountains and the West. Following the capture of Washington, D.C. in 1814, banks outside New England suspend specie payment, eliminating any need to redeem notes and greatly facilitating their issue; notes of New England banks are accepted at par since they remain exchangeable for gold or silver, New York notes are subject to a 10 percent discount, Baltimore and Washington notes carry a 20 percent discount, and notes from west of the Appalachians trade at a 50 percent discount — with all notes circulating in company with a mass of counterfeit paper.	United States
1812–1817	Paper money	Banking	In the absence of the First Bank of the United States, every location large enough to have a church, a tavern, or a blacksmith shop is deemed a suitable place for setting up a bank, with other corporations and tradesmen issuing currency and even barbers and bartenders competing with banks — nearly every citizen regarding it as his constitutional right to issue money. The notes of western banks trade at a 50 percent discount, meaning prices in those notes have doubled, and the monetary disorder contributes, if only marginally, to the maladroit general management of the War of 1812, making the absence of the Bank's services — purchase and marketing of government bonds, transfer and disbursement of government funds — acutely felt in the conduct of the war.	United States
1816	Bank money	Banking	In 1814 financial leaders including Stephen Girard, David Parish, and John Jacob Astor formulate plans for a new Second Bank of the United States, and in the next months they and others urge its need in Washington. In 1816 the Second Bank is chartered — larger than its predecessor — as monetary disorder and wartime financial disorganization make the case for a central banking institution impossible to resist, repeating the pattern by which the First Bank's value becomes apparent only after its disappearance.	United States, Washington D.C.
1816–1818	Bank money	Banking	Initially, as the Bank of England had done a century before, the Second Bank of the United States shows powerfully the need for a regulator of the regulator: in 1816 the postwar boom is full on and the Bank is especially active in speculation in western lands, joyously participating in real estate loans and, as though to emphasize its lax intentions, allowing a wild speculation in its own stock. The Bank refrains from presenting the notes of state banks for redemption, not pressing for restraint by others, recalling perhaps the disfavor into which its predecessor had fallen from that practice. In 1818 the Baltimore branch of the Bank, its funds extensively lost in bad loans, goes bankrupt — though under the loose-jointed arrangements then prevailing this does not bring down the Philadelphia parent.	United States, Baltimore
1817	Bank money	Banking	In 1817 Pennsylvania charters thirty-seven new banks in a single act of the legislature, exemplifying the explosive proliferation of state banking institutions in the years immediately following the expiration of the First Bank of the United States's charter — a pace of bank creation that outstrips any capacity for regulatory oversight and sets the stage for the recurring cycles of overexpansion, speculation, and collapse that characterize American banking in the first half of the nineteenth century.	Pennsylvania, United States
1819	Bank money	Banking	The Amsterdam Exchange Bank, after more than two centuries of operation, winds up its affairs — its end signaled in its final years by the inability to satisfy depositors on demand, a consequence of undisclosed loans to the Dutch East India Company and the City of Amsterdam that had hollowed out the deposits it was founded to safeguard. The bank's collapse confirms the pattern Galbraith identifies as a constant in monetary history: the institutions created to remedy monetary abuse reliably become sources of new abuse themselves, and the most celebrated symbol of monetary rectitude in European history succumbs to the same temptations as the private mints it replaced.	Amsterdam, Dutch Republic
1819	Bank money	Banking	In 1819 William Jones, a politician of questionable intelligence but proven bad judgment, is replaced as head of the Second Bank of the United States by Langdon Cheves, described by most historians as a notably insensitive man who may well have been what the occasion required. He institutes a drastic policy of loan contraction and foreclosure; simultaneously, though it would appear coincidental, the boom collapses, prices fall, debtors are closed out, and bankruptcies rise. This is the first of the five great panics which, at intervals of around twenty years, mark the history of the nineteenth century — establishing the recurring cycle of boom, contraction, and collapse that characterizes American banking before the creation of the Federal Reserve.	United States
1821	Metallic coin	Monetary policy	In 1821, with the Napoleonic Wars over, full convertibility of Bank of England notes is restored at the old rate of exchange between notes and gold, vindicating the position of David Ricardo who had argued in the Bullion Committee that notes should always be fully convertible into metal on demand. Ricardo, described as superb in willing the ends but weak in willing the means, is triumphant in principle having failed only as a matter of practical necessity during the war years — and in the end wins also in practice, as reputable opinion remains strongly on his side. The restoration of convertibility settles for a generation the question of whether paper notes require metallic backing, though the settlement proves temporary as the structural pressures of government finance repeatedly reassert themselves in subsequent decades.	England
1823	Bank money	Banking	In 1823 Nicholas Biddle succeeds as head of the Second Bank of the United States — a more interesting, intelligent, and eclectic figure who had been declined a degree at the University of Pennsylvania when he graduated at thirteen as too young. Unlike his predecessors Biddle has a clear perception of the Bank's role: he wishes it to be affirmative and useful in making loans and a positive force in the community, while also seeing clearly its function as a restraining force on the state banks. Under Biddle numerous new branches are established until there are twenty-nine in total, loans and investment in securities are expanded, and payments including those on behalf of the government are accepted only in the notes of banks that redeem them in gold or silver — the willingness of banks to do so kept under current test by returning their notes promptly for redemption. The state banks respond to this importunity by turning in the notes of the Bank of the United States for specie, each side policing the other in a mutual restraint system that represents the most sophisticated central banking yet practiced in America.	United States, Philadelphia
1824	Paper money	Speculation	In 1824, memories of the South Sea bubble having sufficiently dimmed, another notable outbreak of company promotions and issues occurs in England, many reflecting the fatal attraction to South America and including an encouraging response to a company "to drain the Red Sea with a view to recovering the treasure abandoned by the Egyptians after the crossing of the Jews." The easy-going lending policy of the Bank of England is thought, though only after the later collapse, to have encouraged the boom — illustrating the recurring pattern in which institutional memory of past manias fades within a generation, enabling the next cycle of euphoria and collapse.	England, London
1825	Bank money	Banking	Beginning around 1825, the Bank of England formally recognizes its responsibility to be lender of last resort — the provider of a reliable supply of wholly acceptable money when, for whatever reason, people wish to turn their deposits in commercial banks into cash which, by the nature of fractional-reserve banking, is not physically there. In the crises of 1825 and 1833 there are spectacular runs for gold, and the pattern repeats several times across the century, with the Bank each time raising its rate to attract funds and then meeting the needs of all solvent bankers — so reassuring depositors that, as was true at Amsterdam, the certainty that money can be got takes away all desire to have it.	England, London
1832	Bank money	Banking	In 1832 the pro-Bank forces in Congress led by Henry Clay, the Kentucky senator and leader of the Whig Party (United States), pass a bill renewing the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, and Andrew Jackson vetoes it in a stinging message, making the Bank a major issue in the election later that year. Nicholas Biddle is not without resources: keeping with his belief that banking is the ultimate source of power, he has regularly advanced funds to members of Congress when delay on appropriations bills holds up their pay, and Daniel Webster, the Massachusetts senator and lawyer, is at various times a director of the Bank and on retainer as its counsel, writing to Biddle that his retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual and that if it is wished his relation to the Bank should be continued, it may be well to send the usual retainers. Jackson wins the election, and the fate of the Bank is thus sealed — the idea of central banking in the United States is set aside for another eighty years.	United States
1832	Bank money	Banking	Although the charter of the Second Bank of the United States does not expire until 1836, the anticipating controversy starts several years earlier and is acrimonious. Nicholas Biddle faces opposition from the Establishment and from hard-money men, from eastern bankers who resent his discipline, and from concern in New York that the Bank is giving Philadelphia undue eminence in financial affairs — had the central bank survived there, Philadelphia would perhaps have been the nation's major financial center and Wall Street merely another state street. Andrew Jackson also finds a sympathetic ear among workers who feel that paper money, whether issued by the government or a bank, is a device by which they are defrauded through higher prices or the imposition of a discount on their just pay. Opposition comes most severely from the smaller, newer, and more ephemeral state banks and from citizens whose chance for economic advance depends on the existence of such institutions, with the new settlements of the West particularly focused on the need for easy credit and easier creditors.	United States
1833	Bank money	Banking	A decade after the 1824 speculation, another expansion of loans and boom is followed by a heavy run on reserves, bringing the Bank of England to the point of facing either suspension or bankruptcy. It is saved by a consortium of French bankers who advance gold drawn from the Banque de France, the arrangement serving among other things to disguise the indignity of the rescue of the Bank of England by the Banque de France — an episode that reveals the structural fragility of even the most prestigious monetary institution when caught between its lending and its reserve obligations.	England, France
1833	Bank money	Banking	Back in office for another four years, Andrew Jackson moves promptly to remove the government deposits from the Second Bank of the United States, initially held in selected state banks and then more widely dispersed — a decisive act that accelerates the Bank's decline and ends any prospect of recharter, dismantling the most effective instrument of monetary regulation yet developed in the United States and leaving the country's banking system without a central disciplining authority for the remainder of the century.	United States
1833	Bank money	Monetary policy	Legislation in 1833 exempts the Bank of England from the usury laws, facilitating its use of the bank rate — the rate at which it loans funds to other banks or accepts credit instruments from those seeking funds for commercial transactions — as an instrument for regulating the money supply. When an unduly rapid expansion of bank lending signals an outflow of gold for overseas purchases or foreign investment, the Bank raises the bank rate, signaling to other banks that they should restrict their lending; if the signal is missed, the Bank can sell government securities on the open market, leaving other banks with less cash against their deposits and forcing them to be more restrained in making new loans, with customers able to replenish cash only by borrowing from the Bank at the higher rate. Thus the Bank of England comes to regulate lending — and therewith the making of deposits and money — by the banking system as a whole, establishing the template for monetary policy through interest rates and open-market operations that central banks employ to the present day.	England, London
1836–1837	Metallic coin	Monetary policy	In 1836 the Federal government decrees that henceforth public lands must be paid for in hard money or notes of banks that redeem their notes in specie — the Specie Circular — an inconvenient and widely criticized requirement that tests the quality of state bank note issues and puts a modest crimp on both bank lending and bank creation, as the insistence of the two Bank of the United States on returning notes for redemption had done before. In the following year, though not necessarily as a consequence, comes the panic — the remorse that so reliably follows speculative euphoria — marking the second of the five great panics of the nineteenth century and confirming the recurring cycle of boom and collapse that characterizes the free banking era.	United States
1837–1853	Metallic coin	Monetary policy	In the years before the American Civil War the accepted currency of the United States is either gold coin or increasingly gold alone: legislation in 1834 and 1837 reduces the weight of gold in the dollar in relation to silver, with the silver dollar reduced from 24.75 grains of pure metal to 23.22 grains and the gold dollar remaining at 371.25 grains pure. For those with an eye for profit the best gain is to sell silver in the open market, buy gold, and take that to the mint; after the California Gold Rush gold comes to the mint in such volume that it becomes profitable to melt down subsidiary coins — half-dollars, quarters, and dimes — and exchange the resulting silver for gold to be coined. Congress remedies this in 1853 by diluting the silver in subsidiary coins so that no profit can be gained from taking the amalgam to the mint. After 1837 the money of the United States is precious metal and the metal is gold; paper currency consists only of bank notes exchangeable into gold; silver drops from sight and from mind — the country is de facto, if not de jure, on the full gold standard.	United States
1840–1860	Paper money	Banking	By the time of the American Civil War, the American monetary system is, without rival, the most confusing in the long history of commerce and associated cupidity from Amsterdam before 1609 to the present. An estimated 7,000 different bank notes are in greater or lesser degree of circulation, the issue of some 1,600 different or defunct state banks; paper and printing being cheap and the right of note issue defended as a human right, individuals have gone into the business on their own behalf, and an estimated 5,000 counterfeit issues are currently in circulation. No one can do any considerable business without an up-to-date guide distinguishing wholesome notes from the less good, the orphaned, and the bad — a "Bank Note Reporter" or "Counterfeit Detector" being essential literature in any significant business enterprise.	United States
1844	Bank money	Monetary policy	After an intense discussion of the respective roles of currency and banking in monetary management, Robert Peel, the British Prime Minister, puts the Bank of England firmly in what Walter Bagehot, the English journalist and economist, thirty years later calls the "cast-iron system" via the Bank Charter Act 1844 of that year. The Act fixes the note issue of the Bank at £14 million, to be secured by government bonds, with additional notes issuable only as there is gold and silver in the vault at no more than one-fourth the latter. The cast-iron system proves too rigorous for the Bank's function of supplying funds when people come in distressing numbers for their deposits in lesser banks, and this fault is remedied by suspending the law whenever it proves unduly inconvenient — establishing the precedent that emergency monetary needs override formal statutory constraints.	England, London
1850	Metallic coin	Gold discovery	The rush of gold to the world following the California Gold Rush of 1848–1850 and discoveries in Australia produces the anomaly that the gold standard system is designed to prevent: gold becomes so abundant that its value falls and the resulting rise in prices becomes acutely alarming to those committed to sound money. The episode reveals the structural fragility of a monetary system whose stability depends on the accidental constancy of gold supply, demonstrating that the gold standard offers no protection against inflation when major new deposits are discovered — a vulnerability that recurs with the Witwatersrand Gold Rush later in the century.	California, Australia, South Africa
1862	Paper money	Currency issue	In the fiscal year ending June 30, 1861, the expenditures of the United States government are $67 million, but the scale of spending increases by orders of magnitude as the American Civil War escalates, and the hard-money constraints that have governed American finance since the 1830s yield entirely to military necessity. All pretense of constitutional constraint on paper money is dropped, with Salmon P. Chase, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury who personally believes he should be President, asking Congress to authorize repeated issues of United States Note in the absence of any alternative for paying pressing wartime bills. The greenbacks are paper money without constitutional sanction; in 1870, as Chief Justice of the United States speaking sternly for a majority of the Court, Chase holds them to be unconstitutional, and later still in 1871 a different Court reverses this stand with Chase firmly in dissent. The Constitution is a turning point: the Gallatinian and greenback episodes apart, American innovative and inflationary instincts are not stilled but henceforth directed, with great enthusiasm and power, to banks.	United States
1863	Bank money	Banking	With the American Civil War, the sound-money forces make an appreciable gain against their opponents in Congress: the exigencies of war allow the disorder and confusion of the state banks and their notes to be urged against further opposition, and a new central bank cannot be contemplated but a new system of national banks chartered and regulated by the Federal government is. In 1863, at the strong behest of Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and the Congress, the National Bank Act is passed establishing a new system of national banks — a decisive step toward monetary standardization that the free banking era had made impossible.	United States
1863	Paper money	Monetary policy	The National Bank Act arrangement carries an obvious flaw that Congress seeks to protect against: the size of the note issue depends on the volume of government securities available for deposit against the notes, meaning that were the government profligate, so would be the volume of securities and therewith possibly the volume of notes. To protect against this contingency Congress limits the national bank note issue to $300 million — rarely has economic circumstance managed more successfully to confound the most prudent economic foresight, as in numerous years following the war the Federal government runs a heavy surplus and cannot pay off its debt or retire its securities without destroying the bonds needed to back the national bank notes, making paying off the debt equivalent to destroying the money supply.	United States
1866	Paper money	Monetary policy	On March 3, 1865, a mere month before Appomattox, financial power reasserts itself as Congress is persuaded to pass legislation sweeping all state bank notes away: a tax of 10 percent per annum is levied on all state bank issues with effect from July 1, 1866, representing perhaps the most directly impressive evidence of the power of taxation to destroy a competing currency and forcing state banks to abandon note issue entirely in favor of deposit banking — a structural transformation of the American monetary system achieved not by prohibition but by fiscal elimination.	United States
1867	Metallic coin	Monetary policy	At a relatively uncelebrated conference in Paris in 1867, representatives of the leading industrial countries of Europe decide that henceforth payment in specie would mean payment in gold alone, establishing the institutional foundation of the classical gold standard under which each country's bank notes and deposits are freely transferable into gold at a fixed rate, anyone holding gold can exchange it for the currency of any mature industrial state at a fixed rate, and a fixed rate of exchange consequently prevails between significant currencies. The central banks — by common agreement the Bank of England in particular — police and protect this convertibility, and the armory of instruments for doing so is now complete, though the system proves less accepted in the United States than in Europe.	Europe, Paris
1875	Bank money	Banking	The former Bank of Prussia becomes the Reichsbank in 1875, joining the Banque de France and the Bank of England as one of the principal central banking institutions of the leading industrial countries of Europe, each policing and protecting the convertibility of its national currency into gold and managing the armory of instruments — bank rate, open-market operations, lender of last resort — developed primarily by the Bank of England across the preceding century.	Germany
1878–1908	Bank money	Banking	The transition from note creation to deposit banking does not enforce any very ostentatious caution, and bank failures continue after the banning of state bank notes, reaching epidemic proportions in some years: 140 suspensions in 1878, 496 in 1893, 155 in 1908. Most of the casualties are small state banks, which for another sixty-five years continue to be created and to put or sustain marginal but as-deposits. The penalties of recklessness are more prompt with deposit banking than with note creation but the difference is one of degree — deposit creation, by its nature more cautious than note creation, still allows a bank in obliging a lender to put a deposit instead of a bank note at his command, with the purpose served the same and the structural temptation toward overexpansion equally present.	United States
1890	Bank money	Banking	One of the more spectacular runs of the nineteenth century occurs in 1890 when the great banking house of Barings Bank suddenly finds itself with £21 million in defaulted Argentina bonds on its hands and the prospect of bankruptcy ahead. The Bank of England raises its rate high enough to discourage unnecessary borrowing and to attract unattached investment funds from abroad, then meets the needs of all solvent bankers who come for money, reassuring their depositors and preventing a systemic collapse. The episode establishes as a fixed procedure the Bank's role as lender of last resort — a phrase the Bank begins using from around 1825 — and demonstrates that the certainty that money can be got takes away all desire to have it, restoring confidence without the actual large-scale disbursement of funds that a panic would otherwise require.	England, London, Argentina
1896	Metallic coin	Monetary policy	At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on July 8, 1896, William Jennings Bryan, a 36-year-old former congressman from Nebraska, delivers the Cross of Gold speech, arguing for the free and unlimited coinage of silver alongside gold at a ratio of 16:1 and denouncing the gold standard as the cause of the economic depression following the Panic of 1893. The controversy traces back to the Coinage Act of 1873, which effectively ends bimetallism by eliminating the silver dollar and making gold the sole metallic standard — a measure western miners and farmers term the "Crime of 1873" and which gives rise to the Free Silver movement representing debt-burdened farmers and laborers against eastern banking interests who champion gold as "sound money." Bryan's closing declaration that mankind "shall not be crucified upon a cross of gold" so electrifies the convention that delegates nominate him for president on the fifth ballot, merging the Populist Party's agrarian base into the Democratic coalition; he nonetheless loses the general election to William McKinley, and the United States formally adopts the gold standard in 1900 with the Gold Standard Act, ending the bimetallism debate that had dominated American politics for over two decades.	United States (Chicago)
1913	Bank money	Banking	Following the Panic of 1907, in which the stock market loses nearly half its value and J. P. Morgan personally organizes private bank rescues in the absence of any central monetary authority, Congress passes the Aldrich–Vreeland Act in 1908, creating the National Monetary Commission chaired by Senator Nelson Aldrich to investigate permanent reform. Aldrich's 1911 proposal for a banker-controlled National Reserve Association, devised in part at a secret 1910 meeting on Jekyll Island, is attacked as giving too much power to Wall Street and dies amid the 1912 election, in which Democratic opposition to the "Money Trust" becomes a platform plank. President Woodrow Wilson, seeking a middle ground between progressives like William Jennings Bryan and conservative bankers, signs the Federal Reserve Act into law on December 23, 1913, creating twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks overseen by a presidentially appointed Board in Washington — a deliberate compromise that avoids a single all-powerful central bank while finally giving the United States, eighty years after the destruction of the Second Bank, an institution able to expand and contract the currency and serve as lender of last resort.	United States (Washington, D.C.)
1914	Metallic coin	Currency crisis	Within weeks of the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, every belligerent nation suspends convertibility of its currency into gold, effectively ending the classical gold standard that had reached its peak only the year before. The expense of the war proves an order of magnitude greater than any previous conflict, and new taxation alone cannot cover it; the continental belligerents — Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, and Russia — finance a large share of the war by printing money, while in Britain the Currency and Banknotes Act 1914 authorizes the Bank of England to issue paper money as legal tender without formally suspending gold redemption, gold coins nonetheless disappearing from circulation in accordance with Gresham's law as patriotic appeals and procedural obstacles discourage conversion. Belligerent governments view the departure from gold as a temporary wartime suspension rather than permanent abandonment, but the war's massive sovereign debts and resulting inflation — prices roughly doubling in the United States and Britain, tripling in France, and quadrupling in Italy — mean that when countries attempt to restore convertibility in the 1920s, most must re-peg significantly below pre-war parity, setting the stage for the gold standard's final and complete collapse during the Great Depression.	United Kingdom, France, Germany, Austria, Russia
1931–1934	Metallic coin	Currency crisis	United Kingdom becomes the first major power to abandon the gold standard in late 1931, when the Bank of England asks the government to end its obligation to provide gold bullion on demand, devaluing the pound and putting immediate pressure on other currencies including the Dutch guilder. Within a year only 24 of 47 countries remain on gold, and the United States, urged by President Herbert Hoover to pursue a deflationary strategy that deepens the Great Depression, holds out until Franklin D. Roosevelt takes office in 1933. Roosevelt's Emergency Banking Act of 1933 prohibits the export and hoarding of gold and empowers the Treasury to demand its surrender; via Executive Order 6102 citizens are required to sell their gold bullion and coins to the government, compensated at the prevailing rate, after which the official price of gold is raised from $20.37 to $35 per ounce under the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 — a rate that holds until the Nixon shock of 1971. From 1933 to 1937 unemployment falls from 25 to 14 percent and industrial production rises 60 percent, lending retrospective support to the view that abandoning gold and devaluing the dollar eased the Depression's worst effects, even as France, which delays leaving gold the longest, suffers a 25 percent price deflation and a one-third decline in national income between 1931 and 1935.	United Kingdom, United States, France
1944	Fiat currency	Monetary policy	Delegates from 44 Allied nations gather at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, from July 1 to 22, 1944, for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, designing a new international monetary system intended to avoid the closed markets and competitive currency devaluations that had characterized the 1930s. The Bretton Woods system establishes the International Monetary Fund to monitor exchange rates and lend reserve currencies to nations facing balance-of-payments deficits, and the World Bank to finance postwar reconstruction, with the principal designers being John Maynard Keynes, adviser to the British Treasury, and Harry Dexter White, chief international economist at the U.S. Treasury. The United States, controlling two-thirds of the world's gold, insists the system rest on both gold and the dollar, with member countries agreeing to keep their currencies fixed but adjustable within a 1 percent band to the dollar, which is in turn fixed to gold at $35 an ounce; the IMF formally comes into existence in December 1945 when its first twenty-nine members sign its Articles of Agreement, while the Soviet Union, present at the conference, later declines to ratify the final agreements. The resulting fixed exchange rate system underpins postwar reconstruction and global trade for over a quarter century until mounting strain on U.S. gold reserves brings about its collapse with the Nixon shock of 1971.	United States (Bretton Woods, New Hampshire)
1945–1948	Commodity money	Commodity money	In the aftermath of World War II, cigarettes and alcohol replace the official Reichsmark as the practical medium of exchange in occupied Germany, as hyperinflationary collapse and the devastation of productive capacity render the official currency nearly worthless for ordinary transactions. American and British cigarettes, valued for their portability, divisibility, and stable demand among both German civilians and occupying soldiers, function as a de facto parallel currency until the 1948 German currency reform introduces the Deutsche Mark and restores confidence in an official medium of exchange. The episode is a striking twentieth-century recurrence of the oldest pattern in monetary history: when a sovereign currency loses public trust, communities spontaneously revert to whatever commodity commands sufficiently broad and stable demand, echoing the wampum, tobacco, and leather currencies of earlier centuries even within a technologically advanced industrial economy.	Germany
1950	Fiat currency	Currency issue	The first universal credit card is introduced in 1950 when Americans Ralph Schneider and Frank McNamara found the Diners Club, creating for the first time a payment instrument accepted across a wide range of establishments rather than being tied to a single retailer or company. American Express debuts a plastic card in 1959, and IBM introduces the magnetic stripe on credit cards in the 1960s to contain account information, eliminating the need for merchants to telephone credit companies for authorization on every transaction. In the 1990s cards begin to have chips embedded in them to encrypt account information, providing greater security, while the gradual allowance of carried balances — with interest applied — transforms the credit card from a convenience instrument into a debt instrument, with American consumers carrying $1 trillion in credit card debt by 2017. The credit card represents a structural shift in the nature of money: rather than a physical token of value issued by a sovereign authority, it is a claim on a line of credit extended by a private institution, circulating as a de facto currency through the trust placed in the financial system backing it.	United States, Global
1965	Metallic coin	Monetary policy	During the 1960s, production of silver coins for circulation ceases across many countries when the face value of the coin falls below the cost of the precious metal it contains — the reverse of the historical norm in which the metal's market value sits below the coin's denominated value. In the United States, the Coinage Act of 1965 eliminates silver from circulating dimes and quarter dollars, replacing the precious-metal coinage that had persisted since the nation's founding with base-metal clad coinage. The transition marks the formal abandonment of metallic intrinsic value in everyday American coinage six years before the broader Nixon shock severs the dollar's convertibility into gold, illustrating that the practical retreat from commodity money in small-denomination currency precedes, and to some degree anticipates, the larger structural break in the international monetary system.	United States
1971	Fiat currency	Monetary policy	Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, unilaterally cancels the direct convertibility of the United States dollar into gold, an action that becomes known as the Nixon shock and brings to an end the Bretton Woods system under which the dollar had been fixed since 1944 at $35 per troy ounce of gold, with other currencies calibrated to the dollar at fixed rates. The decision follows mounting pressure on US gold reserves as the costs of the Vietnam War and domestic spending programs lead to persistent dollar outflows and foreign governments increasingly seeking to redeem dollars for gold rather than hold the depreciating currency. Since the Nixon shock, a system of national fiat currency has been used globally, with variable exchange rates between major currencies replacing the fixed-rate system that had governed international finance for the preceding quarter century — completing the historical transition from money grounded in metallic convertibility to money grounded purely in government decree and public confidence, a transition whose beginnings trace back through the assignats, the greenbacks, and the suspended convertibility of the Bank of England.	United States, Global
1978	Fiat currency	Monetary policy	The International Organization for Standardization publishes ISO 4217, a system of three-digit alphabetic codes designed to denote currencies unambiguously in international trade and finance. The codes are constructed on a systematic basis: the first two letters correspond to the ISO 3166 country code, while the third letter denotes the specific monetary unit, so that for example the US dollar becomes USD, the British pound GBP, and the Japanese yen JPY. The publication of a universal currency coding standard reflects the growing complexity of international financial transactions in the post-Bretton Woods system era, where floating exchange rates and the proliferation of national currencies create practical difficulties for banks, clearinghouses, and trading systems operating across multiple jurisdictions. ISO 4217 becomes the global standard for currency identification in banking, commerce, and international finance, embedded in everything from wire transfer systems to airline ticketing software, and is updated periodically as currencies are created, renamed, or discontinued.	Global
1983	Fiat currency	Monetary theory	American cryptographer David Chaum conceives of a type of cryptographic electronic money called ecash, publishing the foundational concept in his paper "Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments." Chaum later implements the idea through DigiCash in 1995, an early form of cryptographic electronic payment requiring user software to withdraw notes from a bank and designate specific encrypted keys before they could be sent to a recipient, rendering the digital currency untraceable by third parties. Although DigiCash itself fails commercially, Chaum's blind-signature cryptography establishes the conceptual foundation — privacy-preserving digital tokens verified through cryptographic proof rather than central ledger inspection — that later cryptocurrency designers, including the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, draw upon a quarter-century later.	United States
2009	Fiat currency	Currency issue	Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency system, is created by an anonymous computer programmer or group of programmers known as Satoshi Nakamoto, representing the first successful implementation of a decentralized currency operating outside the control of any central bank or sovereign government. The currency is not issued by any monetary authority but is instead maintained by a decentralized network of computers that keeps track of transactions through a public ledger known as the blockchain, with users identified only by their digital wallet ID. New bitcoins are created through a process called cryptocurrency mining, in which computers race to solve complex mathematical problems to verify blocks of transactions, with the owner of the winning computer receiving newly created bitcoins as reward — a system that makes the currency supply mathematically predictable and capped at 21 million units. Bitcoin challenges the foundational assumption of all prior monetary systems — that currency requires either intrinsic commodity value or sovereign backing to function — demonstrating instead that a sufficiently broad community of users agreeing on exchange value can sustain a monetary system, though its volatility and limited acceptance relative to sovereign currencies leave its long-term monetary status contested.	Global
2021 (June 9)	Fiat currency	Monetary policy	El Salvador announces that it will adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, becoming the first country in the world to do so, after its Legislative Assembly of El Salvador votes 62–22 to pass a bill submitted by President Nayib Bukele classifying the cryptocurrency as such. The decision represents an unprecedented experiment: a sovereign nation extends formal legal-tender status to a decentralized digital currency with no central issuing authority, no metallic or commodity backing, and a notoriously volatile market price, inverting the entire historical trajectory of currency development from commodity money through fiat currency back issued by a government but this time without government control over supply or value. Cuba follows two months later with Resolution 215 recognizing and regulating cryptocurrencies, while the move draws skepticism from international financial institutions concerned about the implications for monetary stability and consumer protection in an economy reliant on remittances.	El Salvador
2021 (September)	Fiat currency	Monetary policy	The government of China, at the time the single largest market for cryptocurrency, declares all cryptocurrency transactions illegal, completing a crackdown that had previously banned the operation of intermediaries and miners within the country. The decision follows a series of escalating restrictions — financial institutions and payment companies barred from providing cryptocurrency-related services in May, and provincial mining bans citing concerns over electricity consumption from coal-fired power — and represents the most comprehensive sovereign rejection of decentralized digital currency to date. The Chinese ban precipitates an exodus of cryptocurrency mining operations to jurisdictions with cheaper electricity and more permissive regulation, including Canada, Kazakhstan, and Texas, illustrating that even a currency designed to operate outside the control of any single government remains dependent on the physical infrastructure — electricity, hardware, internet access — that individual sovereign states can restrict at will.	China
2022 (May 11)	Fiat currency	Currency crisis	The Terra (blockchain) stablecoin UST, designed to maintain a fixed peg of one US dollar through an algorithmic mechanism rather than a reserve of actual dollars or other assets, falls from $1 to 26 cents, triggering the collapse of Terraform Labs and the loss of nearly $40 billion invested in the Terra and Luna tokens. The episode exposes the central vulnerability of algorithmic stablecoins: a peg maintained through market incentives and computer code rather than physical reserves collapses with self-reinforcing speed once confidence breaks, since the same mechanism designed to restore the peg can instead accelerate its destruction as holders rush to exit. The Terra collapse echoes, in compressed digital time, the centuries-old pattern of paper and bank money losing value once the public ceases to trust the mechanism — whether metallic, governmental, or algorithmic — that supposedly anchors it, with South Korean prosecutors subsequently requesting an Interpol Red Notice against the company's founder, Do Kwon.	South Korea, Global
2025 (February 9)	Metallic coin	Monetary policy	Donald Trump, the 47th President of the United States, instructs Scott Bessent, the United States Secretary of the Treasury, to halt production of the penny (United States coin), citing its high production costs relative to its face value. The decision echoes the earlier elimination of the Penny (Canadian coin) from circulation in 2012 for the same underlying reason — the cost of minting a low-denomination coin from base metal exceeding the value it represents — and continues a pattern stretching back to the 1965 elimination of silver from US dimes and quarters, in which the gap between a coin's intrinsic production cost and its face value repeatedly forces governments to abandon or redesign small-denomination currency. The episode underscores a structural irony of modern fiat coinage: even currency with no commodity backing can become uneconomical to produce purely as a matter of metal and manufacturing costs.	United States

Numerical and visual data

Wikipedia views

The chart below shows monthly pageviews for the Wikipedia article on Currency from 2015 to 2026, broken down by platform. Total views peak above 60,000 in late 2016 and early 2018, coinciding with the height of public interest in cryptocurrency and the 2017–2018 Bitcoin bull run, before declining unevenly to around 20,000–30,000 by the mid-2020s. Desktop and mobile-web traffic dominate throughout and track each other closely, both showing the same 2016–2018 spikes, while desktop-spider (automated crawler) traffic grows steadily from near zero in 2015 to a sustained plateau around 5,000–10,000 by 2022, reflecting the increasing indexing of the article by search engines and AI systems. Mobile-app and mobile-web-spider traffic remain negligible throughout the period.

Google Trends

The chart below shows worldwide search interest for "gold standard", "fiat currency", "cryptocurrency", "bitcoin", and "dollar" from 2004 to the present. "Dollar" dominates throughout as the most consistently searched term, averaging well above the others, while "bitcoin" shows the most dramatic volatility — a sharp spike in late 2017 coinciding with that year's speculative peak, followed by recurring surges in 2021, 2024, and 2025 tracking subsequent bull markets. "Gold standard", "fiat currency", and "cryptocurrency" generate comparatively negligible search interest throughout the period, indicating that public curiosity about historical or structural monetary questions remains far smaller than interest in the dollar as a currency or bitcoin as a speculative asset.

Google Ngram

The chart below shows the relative frequency of "gold standard", "inflation", "paper money", "central bank", "fiat currency", and "banknote" in the Google Books corpus from 1800 to 2019. "Inflation" rises sharply during the 1920s–1930s and again in the 1970s, tracking the timeline's currency crisis and Nixon shock rows. "Gold standard" remains a minor term until the 1980s, then climbs steeply through the 2000s and 2010s — likely reflecting retrospective debate and commentary on the system well after its 1971 collapse rather than discussion of it as a live policy. "Paper money", "central bank", "fiat currency", and "banknote" stay comparatively flat throughout, suggesting these are more specialized or technical terms that do not experience the same surges tied to specific historical episodes.

Meta information on the timeline

How the timeline was built

The initial version of the timeline was written by Sebastian Sanchez.

Check Detail construction for full timeline in timelines, Inclusion criteria for full timeline in timelines, and Representativeness of events in timelines.

Funding information for this timeline is available.

Feedback and comments

Feedback for the timeline can be provided at the following places:

• Talk:Timeline of currencies

What the timeline is still missing

• Second source verification: Most rows still cite only Galbraith (1975). Cross-checking against a second source is recommended.

Timeline update strategy

This timeline is updated as new sources are identified and processed. Priority is given to extending coverage beyond 1890, adding non-Western monetary history, and cross-checking existing Galbraith-sourced rows against secondary sources such as Davies, A History of Money (1994) and Ferguson, The Ascent of Money (2008).

See also

• Timeline of Bitcoin
• Timeline of cryptocurrencies
• Timeline of index funds
• Timeline of economic statistics
• Timeline of e-commerce
• Timeline of gold