Book contents
- Money in the Dutch Republic
- Money in the Dutch Republic
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Money as Social Technology
- 2 Grain Money in a Farming Community
- 3 Ink Money in a Princely Estate
- 4 Metallurgy and the Making of Intrinsic Value
- 5 Mercantile Practice and Everyday Use
- 6 Patriotic Economics and the Making of a National Currency
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Archival Sources
- References
- Index
3 - Ink Money in a Princely Estate
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2022
- Money in the Dutch Republic
- Money in the Dutch Republic
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Money as Social Technology
- 2 Grain Money in a Farming Community
- 3 Ink Money in a Princely Estate
- 4 Metallurgy and the Making of Intrinsic Value
- 5 Mercantile Practice and Everyday Use
- 6 Patriotic Economics and the Making of a National Currency
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Archival Sources
- References
- Index
Summary
Chapter 3 shows how stewards of the princes of Orange-Nassau employed a specific money of account, the Artois pound, to manage land, livestock, and corvée labour across the family’s fifty domains, one of which was the lordship of Bredevoort. The Artois pound was not minted as coins, and nobody in Bredevoort used it to make or receive payments. As an accounting convention, it only existed as ink on slips of paper and in bound volumes and thus required constant scribal labour to be valuable. The stewards’ trained eyes and hands parsed the multiplicity of Bredevoort’s coins, animals, grains, and labour into homogeneous money objects that had currency across the entire accounting system, but not beyond. As the chapter shows, such a system using homogeneous money was also imagined by the mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin, and while he failed to install double-entry bookkeeping in the domains of the Orange-Nassau family, the stewards shared his ideals of surveillance and profit. A series of instructions provided the script for the audit rituals that were performed year after year and that left their traces on the pages of the accounts.
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- Money in the Dutch RepublicEveryday Practice and Circuits of Exchange, pp. 58 - 94Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022