Money and the institutions built on top of it, from clay tablets to surveillance rails
The History of Money and Banking
The History of Money and Banking is my long narrative of money itself, and of the institutions built on top of it, from the clay tablets of Uruk to the surveillance rails that govern payments today. The oldest financial records on earth arrive already complex: loans, rate caps, deposit law, and royal debt amnesties on clay, 2,000 years before the first coin! The barter story was always a guess.
In the history of banking proper, the Knights Templar, bankers who wore swords, built Europe's first international settlement network, and the king who owed them money destroyed it. Then come the debt machines and the house of the red shield. If you have read my Bitcoin history, this is the longer story it sits inside. The ledger came before the coin.
The parts, in order
- Part 1: The History of Money & Banking: The Bankers Who Wore Swords
- History of Money and Banking, Part 2. Ancient Money From Prehistory
- 9/11 and the Money: The Day the Surveillance State Was Born
- Part 3: The Debt Machines: Athens, Rome, and a Coin in Jerusalem
- Part 4: The House of the Red Shield: The Rothschilds, 1744 to Suez