New PDF release: Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and

By George Anthony Selgin

ISBN-10: 0472116312

ISBN-13: 9780472116317

Sturdy funds tells the interesting tale of British brands' problem to the Crown's monopoly on coinage. within the 1780s, while the economic Revolution was once collecting momentum, the Royal Mint did not produce sufficient small-denomination coinage for manufacturing facility vendors to pay their employees. because the foreign money scarcity threatened to derail business development, brands started to mint customized cash, referred to as "tradesman's tokens." quickly gaining extensive attractiveness, those tokens served because the nation's hottest foreign money for wages and retail revenues till 1821, whilst the Crown outlawed all moneys other than its own.Economist George Selgin provides a full of life story of enterprising brands, technological thoughts, substitute currencies, and struggles over the suitable to coin felony money.George Selgin is Professor of Economics within the Terry collage of industrial on the collage of Georgia and examine Fellow on the self sufficient Institute in Oakland, California (www.independent.org).

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Extra info for Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821

Sample text

Brummagem Ha 'pence Understandably, shortages of official small change boosted the production and circulation of all sorts of unofficial substitutes, including large quantities of counterfeit copper coin. The very nature of the counterfeiting trade rules out precise estimates of its magnitude. But there is no doubt that it was a big business, with Birmingham and London serving as its manufacturing headquarters, and that its magnitude grew as the eighteenth century wore on. p to regal copper coin production.

Not all silver coins were melted and exported: so long as gold coins couldn't serve as small change, some silver money stayed behind. But market forces saw to it that the coins that remained had shrunk enough, either through natural wear or through deliberate shorting, to render their export unprofitable. Thus time, assisted by shears, files, aqua fortis, and even the vigorous shaking of half-filled money bags, raised the de facto mint equivalent of standard silver from sixty-two to no fewer than sixty-eight shillings to the pound.

He explains, Not only was there no power, had there been knowledge, to direct provision by the Mint towards or away from particular areas according to need; there was no organization whatever ... to redistribute the burdensome loads which silted up certain cities. As long as the British government failed to officially recognize the fiduciary status of its silver and copper coins, it couldn't be expected to take seriously the requirements for an adequate token coinage and especially the requirement that such a coinage be safeguarded from counterfeiting.

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Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821 by George Anthony Selgin


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