Money, banking & finance

Topics represented

Economic Sciences (156) · Nobel laureates (99) · People (99) · Nobel Prizes (57) · Money, banking & finance (28) · British Empire (24) · Companies, trade & extraction (16) · Law & imperial government (9) · War & conquest (7) · Resistance & colonized agency (6) · Colonization & sovereignty (5) · Slavery & coerced labor (5)

Records and sources

Ordered by start date. Long lives and processes may begin before the period you want to study.

1. c. 2340 BCE–c. 2316 BCE

   Mesopotamian records of silver payments

   A tablet from Umma dated between 2340 and 2316 BCE records silver payments to named people. Together with other cuneiform archives, it shows that amounts, obligations, and transfers could be fixed in writing. It is evidence of concrete administrative practice, not of coined money or a uniform monetary economy across Mesopotamia.

2. c. 2000 BCE–c. 1800 BCE

   Assyrian merchant credit and debt tablets

   In Assyrian trading colonies in Anatolia, tablets recorded silver loans, due dates, interest, witnesses, and disputes among merchants. The documentation reveals credit and accounting within long-distance exchange networks; it is not a modern bank and does not recover every term of ancient credit.

3. 1823 BCE

   Silver loan from the Shamash temple at Sippar

   A Babylonian tablet dated 1823 BCE documents a silver loan from the Shamash temple, with principal and interest due at harvest. It illustrates that temple institutions could participate in documented credit. One surviving contract is not enough to turn all temples into banks or to establish this credit’s relative weight in the local economy.

4. c. 520 BCE–c. 260 BCE

   Athenian tetradrachms as high-denomination civic coinage

   Athens struck silver tetradrachms with Athena and the owl from the late sixth century BCE; the type remained recognisable for centuries. This entry follows the standardisation and trust of one specific civic currency, not the origin of all coinage—which is treated in the World layer—and does not assume that it displaced credit, payments in kind, or local coins.

5. c. 1000–c. 1100

   Chinese paper money and state/merchant issuance

   During the eleventh century, China used paper money issued by both merchants and authorities, especially for large transactions, alongside bronze coins and unminted silver. The milestone concerns the payment and issuance mechanism, not Chinese doctrines or traditions, nor an anachronistic idea of a fully modern central bank.

6. c. 1200–c. 1400

   Medieval fairs, bills, and payment netting

   At medieval trade fairs, credits and debts could be entered in accounts and netted before balances were settled in specie; bills of exchange helped move payments between locations. These techniques reduced physical transport and settlement costs in specific settings, but depended on merchant networks, trust, and local rules, not on a unified European banking system.

7. c. 1300

   Book transfers between clients of Venetian banks

   By the early fourteenth century, clients of the same Venetian bank could transfer funds by book entry. It is an early form of giro payment within one bank, not evidence of easy clearing among all banks or a direct equivalent of current electronic payments.

8. 1407–1408

   Casa and Bank of Saint George: public debt, deposits, and giro

   Genoa’s Casa delle Compere di San Giorgio was organised in 1407 to consolidate and administer public debt; in 1408 a public bank for deposits, giro, and credit operated within it. It combined fiscal and financial functions of an urban republic. Its distinctive institutional arrangement should not be presented as the undisputed first modern bank or as an identical model for other states.

9. 1486

   Earliest surviving reference to Ulrich Fugger’s bank

   A municipal record from Augsburg in December 1486 contains the earliest known reference to Ulrich Fugger’s bank and to an instruction to transfer money to Venice. It is precise evidence of financial intermediation in European merchant networks, not a founding date for all Fugger banking or a measure of its later power.

10. 1494

    Pacioli and the first printed exposition of double-entry bookkeeping

    Luca Pacioli’s Summa, published in Venice in 1494, included the first known printed exposition of double-entry bookkeeping. The publication disseminated and fixed practices already used by merchants; it did not invent all double entry or by itself turn accounting into a universal financial system.

11. c. 1557–c. 1597

    Philip II’s suspensions of payments on asientos

    Philip II’s Crown suspended payments on short-term contracts with bankers—asientos—in episodes of 1557–1560, 1575–1577, and 1596–1597. Negotiations restructured those obligations and connected them to long-term juros. Calling them simply “national bankruptcies” erases differences among instruments, creditors, and conversion agreements; nor do they summarise the whole Castilian economy.

12. c. 1571–c. 1650

    Silver circuits between Potosí, Manila, and China

    After Manila’s colonial foundation in 1571, American silver circulated toward the Philippines and China in exchange for textiles, porcelain, spices, and other Asian goods; Potosí was a central node, not the sole source or a single route. This circuit depended on colonial extraction, tribute, trans-Pacific transport, and Asian intermediaries. Sources do not justify one fixed volume of silver or reduce Chinese or American economies to passive demand.

13. 1600

    Elizabeth I charters the East India Company

    The charter incorporated London merchants and granted them an English monopoly on trade from the Cape of Good Hope to the Straits of Magellan. A private trading corporation would gradually become a fiscal, military, and territorial power in Asia

14. 1636–1637

    Dutch tulip contracts and price collapse

    The boom and collapse of 1636–1637 involved private forward contracts on bulbs, often without immediate delivery or margin requirements. Academic evidence debates scope, prices, and effects; this entry records a localised episode of contractual risk and renegotiation, not the myth of an instant ruin of the whole Dutch economy or one lesson about “irrationality.”

15. 1661–1668

    Stockholms Banco notes and creation of the Riksbank

    Stockholms Banco issued Europe’s first modern banknotes in 1661, but lost the capacity to redeem them and failed. In 1668 the Riksdag reorganised the institution as Riksens Ständers Bank, today Sveriges Riksbank. The episode links issuance, confidence, and institutional backing; it does not prove that all paper money automatically causes inflation or crisis.

16. 1670

    Hudson’s Bay Company charter over Rupert’s Land

    Charles II granted a company exclusive trade and authority over the vast Hudson Bay watershed without the consent of the Indigenous nations living there. The fur trade created relations of cooperation, dependence, and conflict while turning a corporation into a territorial authority

17. 1672

    Royal African Company receives an African trade monopoly

    Charles II rechartered the company with an English monopoly in West Africa. Although it traded gold, ivory, and other goods, it became a central institution in Britain’s trafficking of enslaved Africans and Atlantic finance

18. 1694

    Founding of the Bank of England and public credit

    The Bank of England was founded in 1694 as a private bank acting as banker to the government and helping finance war against France. It accepted deposits and its notes evolved from deposit receipts. It is a pivotal point for English public finance, not the single origin of central banking or banknotes in Europe.

19. 1698–1700

    Failure of Scotland’s Darien colony

    The Company of Scotland attempted to establish “New Caledonia” on the Darién isthmus. Disease, poor planning, Spanish resistance, and the lack of English support destroyed the colony, and its financial losses weighed on union negotiations

20. 1707

    Creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain

    The English and Scottish parliaments ratified an incorporating union with one Parliament and market. Scotland gained access to English colonial trade and financial compensation through the “Equivalent,” while retaining distinct legal and religious institutions

21. 1719–1720

    Company of the West/Indies and the Law system

    John Law’s Company of the West absorbed other companies in 1719 and became linked to public-debt operations, paper issuance, and French colonial trade. Speculation drove up its shares and the system unraveled in 1720. It was a specific combination of state finance, corporate privileges, and bank money, not a sufficient explanation of the whole French economy or a mechanical precedent for every later bubble.

22. 1720

    South Sea Company crisis

    The South Sea Company crisis of 1720 affected share prices and London financial confidence; the Bank of England recorded the episode as a shock to confidence in its notes. This entry describes a market and credit crisis in a specific British setting. It neither assigns the outcome to a single person nor treats later anecdotes about Isaac Newton as historical explanation.

23. 1756–1763

    Seven Years’ War and British imperial expansion

    A global war against France and its allies transferred Canada and other positions to Britain, although conquests were returned or exchanged in several theaters. Victory produced new debt, contested Indigenous frontiers, and governing problems that fed the crisis of the Thirteen Colonies

24. 1757

    Plassey and the East India Company’s territorial turn

    Company forces led by Robert Clive defeated Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah through battle, conspiracy, and defections. Plassey did not conquer all India, but it opened the political and fiscal control of Bengal consolidated by Buxar and the grant of the diwani in 1764–1765

25. 1769–1773

    Famine, smallpox, and Company revenue rule in Bengal

    Drought, harvest failure, and epidemic produced catastrophe under the Company’s new revenue regime, which maintained heavy demands and provided inadequate relief. Mortality estimates—including the traditional figure of ten million—are disputed and must not be rendered as an exact count

26. 1773

    Parliament begins regulating the Company’s territorial government

    Financial crisis and reported abuses led Parliament to create a governor-general of Bengal and new forms of supervision. The Act did not end corporate rule; it tied it more closely to the British state

27. 1800

    Founding of the Banque de France

    The Banque de France was founded on 18 January 1800 as a private company with a “public bank” function, issuing notes payable on demand against the discounting of commercial bills. Its privilege of issue for Paris came in 1803 and national monopoly developed gradually; the full functions of a later central bank should therefore not be projected back onto 1800.

28. 1816–1821

    Formal British gold standard and resumption of convertibility

    The 1816 Coinage Act legally established the British gold standard, and banknote convertibility was restored at the pre-war parity in 1821. Britain had already operated with de facto gold predominance at earlier points, and the system remained subject to suspensions and institutional decisions; this entry does not portray the gold standard as an automatic or immutable world order.

29. c. 1822–c. 1829

    Cross-border sovereign bonds and 1820s suspensions

    During the 1820s, newly independent Latin American states and other borrowers issued bonds in European financial centres, largely denominated in foreign currency. Payment suspensions soon followed and were numerous. The process shows how an early international sovereign-loan market worked, not a rule that new states or foreign borrowing inevitably lead to default.

30. 1824–1826

    The Anglo-Burmese War ends at Yandabo

    An extraordinarily costly war between the Company and the Konbaung kingdom ended with the Treaty of Yandabo. Burma ceded Arakan and Tenasserim, renounced claims to Assam and Manipur, and paid an indemnity, opening an expansion that culminated in full annexation