The purpose of this research is to examine how a monied economy affected the commercialization of Europe before 1700. The plan of the research will be to set forth the background and context in which the concept of a money driven economy arose in Europe, and then to discuss the conditions, trends, and events that shaped the environment of commercialism and mercantilism that dominated Europe and the West from the eighteenth century onward.
In order to understand the role that a money based economy played in the development of Europe before 1700, it is useful to look at the history of economies based on media other than money. All discussions of money as a standard of value in history appear to begin as discussions of trade between tribes, peoples, nations. Wells says that trade in the ancient world "was almost entirely a barter trade. There was little or no credit or coined money" (1971, p. 164). But commodities became inconvenient to transport and trade between peoples, and by the time of the Roman conquests, metals, including "iron bars of fixed weight," silver, and especially gold, as "the most precious and therefore most portable of all metallic value standards," was the chief medium of exchange (1971, p. 165). A measure of value that could be transported easily from place to place made the orderly distribution of scarce goods from one locale to another increasingly efficient. But Wells notes that in the earliest days of transition from republic to empire, "money was young in human experience and wild; nobody had it under control. It fluctuated greatly. It was now abundant and now scarce. Men made sly and crude schemes to corner it, to hoard it, to send up prices by releasing hoarded metals" (1971, 386).
In other words, there was limited rationalization of a monetary
system during this period. But as Greider (1987) points out, after Galbraith (1975), from the classical period onward, money increasingly beca...