This chapter surveys the first half-century of the Bank’s history, drawing largely on secondary sources because only limited archival material has survived for this period. The original purpose of the Bank, as stated in its 1609 charter, was to take in various types of coin as deposits, facilitate book-entry (giro) payments among Bank customers, and pay out high-quality coins for withdrawals. Ongoing deterioration in the quality of the circulating coin, largely due to debasement, made it impossible for the Bank to adhere to its original mission. Instead, the Bank developed its own unit of account, the bank florin, which was applied to Bank money and was distinct from the unit of account for local forms of money, the current guilder. Having a distinct unit of account made it easier for the Bank to deter money-losing inter-coin arbitrage. This period also witnessed the development of a secondary market in Bank money to facilitate domestic currency exchanges (bank florins for current guilders). This era closed with the passage of the Dutch Republic’s 1659 coinage ordinance, which granted official status to the bank florin.

This chapter offers an example of the role of the Bank in European state finance. The kingdom of Prussia made heavy use of the Bank during the Seven Years War (1756—1763). Public finance in Prussia during this period was primitive, lacking basic features such as a bond market or central bank. Under heavy financial pressure, Prussian King Frederick II chose to finance much of the war through the production of debased coinage. The task of minting debased coins was outsourced to private contractors (“mint entrepreneurs”), who purchased much of the necessary silver in Amsterdam, making use of credit which was abundant in the Amsterdam market. Details of these transactions are revealed in the Bank’s ledgers. Frederick also relied on gold subsidies from Great Britain, which were paid via Amsterdam and can also be matched to Bank records. Finally, at the end of the war, Frederick called upon his entrepreneurs to engineer a reverse debasement (reinforcement). This activity once again relied heavily on Dutch resources, including remote smelting furnaces, Amsterdam credit, and Bank money. Traces of the entrepreneurs’ activity can again be seen in the Bank’s records.

This chapter describes the development of the Tokugawa economy, illustrating how its patterns and shifts were experienced by producers and consumers in a particular place and time. In outlining the framing features of the Tokugawa economic world, we draw attention to how the proportion occupied by manufacturing industries and distribution mechanisms increased steadily in tandem with expansion of the economy’s overall volume. Diverse factors accompanied and further spurred these trends: urbanization (in cities and country towns), greater social mobility, expanding trade and communication networks, rising income, the labor of women as producers for the market, and a popular consciousness increasingly oriented toward ordinary consumption. This economic development can be described in either positive or negative terms. Economic historians in recent decades have pointed more to the positive aspects that raised the standard of living for many, whereas many social historians note the groups who lost out in the commercialization process, such as low-ranking samurai and landless commoners. Evidence can be given for both perspectives, underlining the complexity of what we call economy.

This chapter considers English writing about market values from the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries – taking as its termini the dissolution of the monasteries, which began in 1536, and the trade depression of the early 1620s. The chapter portrays some of the give and take between proto-literary and proto-economic writing in this period by focusing on the emergent concept of productivity. It begins by outlining the changing material and ideological conditions that prompted writerly attention to money and trade from merchants, statesmen, and imaginative writers. It shows how apparently limited topics of monetary debate in the period – debasement, usury, and the export of bullion – were amplified into far-reaching critiques of value by imaginative writers. And it shows how these value critiques tended in turn to support an emergent arena of autonomous value in what we might recognize as literary production.

Roman historians are typically trained under the aegis of Classics or Classical Studies; hence, they find comfort in the world of sources – a preference manifest in a broadly empiricist outlook and an affinity for methods of induction. There are, as this chapter argues, good reasons to question the reliability of traditional empirical approaches to historical questions. Equally, however, the deductive use of formal economic theory has its own drawbacks. Emergent neoclassical and new institutional studies have produced new questions and new insights, but Roman historians’ use of economic theory has also promulgated new anachronisms and perhaps even ‘economics imperialism’. Is Roman economic history doomed to be forever caught in methodological tug-of-wars over the use of economic theory? This chapter suggests that a way forward may be found in the sociological tradition of methodological dualism – a framework which unequivocally draws upon economic theory as a tool of ‘understanding’ rather than of testing or predicting. Methodological dualism is a foundational framework for rethinking the use of economic theory for understanding Roman monetary history.