A Conspiracy of Paper
Elias sucked on his lower lip. “Give me a shilling,” he said at last. He waved his hand impatiently at my quizzical look. “Come now, play along, Weaver. Put a shilling on the table.”
Elias picked it up before returning it to the table. “That’s a sorry shilling,” he observed. “What’s happened to it?”
It was indeed a sorry shilling. Most of the edges had been filed away until it was a shapeless hunk of metal and only a fraction of its original weight.
“It’s been clipped,” I told him. “The same as every other shilling in the Kingdom.” . . .
“Our shillings are clipped and filed, and the excess silver melted down and sold abroad. Now you have a shilling that contains perhaps three-fourths of its original metal. Is it still worth a shilling? Well, it is, more or less, because we need a medium of exchange for the nation to function smoothly.” He held up the coin between his thumb and index finger. “This clipped shilling is but a metaphor, if you will, of the fiction that the idea of value has become in this Kingdom.”
. . . “Thus the rise of the banknote,” I observed. “At least in part, from what little I understand. If the silver does not circulate, but stays safely where it cannot be harmed, the representation of the silver provides a secure measure of value. The fiction is thus replaced by reality, and your anxiety over these new financial mechanisms undoes itself.”
“But what would happen, Weaver, if there was no silver? If silver was replaced by banknotes — by promises? Today you are used to substituting a banknote for a large sum of money. Perhaps tomorrow you may forget that you ever dealt in money proper. We shall exchange promises for promises, and none of those promises shall ever be fulfilled.”
“Even if such a preposterous thing were to happen, what would be the harm? After all, silver only has value because everyone agrees it has value. It is not like food, which has a use unto itself. If we all agree that banknotes have value, how are they less valuable than silver?”
“But silver is silver. Coins are clipped because you can take your silver to Spain or India or China and exchange it for something you desire. You cannot do that with a banknote, because there is nothing to support the promise outside of its point of origin. Don’t you see, Weaver, these financial institutions are committed to divesting our money of value and replacing it with promises of value. For when they control the promise of value, they control all wealth itself.”
(David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper, a novel set in 1719)
“Coins are clipped because you can take your silver to Spain or India or China and exchange it for something you desire. You cannot do that with a banknote, because there is nothing to support the promise outside of its point of origin.”
I believe $100 bills retain their value quite nicely in other countries.
— cw · Oct 15, 03:44 AM · #
Yes, but for how long?
Not that I am for returning America to a gold/silver-backed currency, mind you.
But to blindly assume that American $100 bills will forever “retain their value quite nicely in other countries” is setting oneself up for what could potentially be a quite nasty fall.
Fiat currency is not magic.
— Travis Mason-Bushman · Oct 15, 05:27 AM · #
“… here in England, a shilling is a shilling.”
“No matter how little it weighs?”
“Yes. In principle, yes.”
“So when a lump of metal is coined in the Mint, it takes on a magical power of shillingness, and even after it has been filed and clipped and worn down to a mere featureless nodule, it is still worth a full shilling?”
“You exaggerate,” Daniel said. “I have here a fine Queen Elizabeth shilling, for example — which I carry around, mind you, as a souvenir of Gloriana’s reigh, since it is far too fine a specimen to actually spend. But as you can see, it is just as bright and shiny as the day it was minted —”
“Especially where it’s recently been clipped there along the side,” the lens-grinder said.
“Normal, pleasing irregularity of the hand-hammered currency, nothing more.”
Isaac said, “My friend’s shilling, though magnificent, and arguably worth two or even three shillings in the market, is no anomaly. Here I have a shilling from the reign of Edward VI, which I obtained after an inebriated son of a Duke, who happened to have borrowed a shilling from me some time earlier, fell unconscious on a floor — the purse in which he carried his finest coins fell open and this rolled out of it — I construed this as repayment of the debt, and the exquisite condition of the coin as interest.”
“How could it roll when three of its edges are flat? It is nearly triangular,” the lens-grinder said.
“A trick of the light.”
[From Quicksilver, of course.]
— sammler · Oct 15, 09:24 AM · #
But silver is silver. Coins are clipped because you can take your silver to Spain or India or China and exchange it for something you desire.
Unless what you desire happens to be a value meal at McDonalds, or a lap dance, or a big-screen TV. For these, you might as well try to pay in beaver fur as pull out a pile of silver.
— JA · Oct 15, 01:00 PM · #
cw, JA: Remember, the book is set in England in 1719. We wouldn’t — at least, I wouldn’t — expect its economic analysis to apply point for point to America in 2008. You might as well complain that the shilling is no longer an English currency unit. It’s an interesting analogue, that’s all.
— Alan Jacobs · Oct 15, 03:15 PM · #
Remember, the book is set in England in 1719 . . .
That was the extent of Liss’s purpose, eh? — a dialectical snapshot of 18th Century monetary analysis?
No, I think CW and I were responsive to both the point of the passage and the point of this post.
— JA · Oct 15, 04:30 PM · #
Alan,
I know. I was rebutting him from the future.
— cw · Oct 15, 07:01 PM · #
It was an interesting excerpt though. I forgot about coin clipping. The shilling of that day was both a smbolic and an actual store of value. That book also seems to have been written in a pretty modern english. Did you translate it, fix the spelling….?
— cw · Oct 15, 07:05 PM · #
cw, re: That book also seems to have been written in a pretty modern english. Did you translate it, fix the spelling….? No, it’s quite a recent novel (2000) and Liss doesn’t try to be too precise in his rendering of 18th-century language. Just a hint here and there. Which is probably for the best.
— Alan Jacobs · Oct 15, 07:09 PM · #
That was me isreading the tag line. “…set in 1719” for “written in 1719.”
— cw · Oct 16, 12:44 AM · #