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LitCharts | October 9 2024
In ancient Chinese script the cowry-shell sign represented money, in words such as ‘to sell’ or ‘reward’
Harari discusses wars—for example, between the Christians and Muslims in the 1200s—to show that despite vast ideological differences, conflicting societies universally accepted and traded with money (specifically, gold coins). During the crusades, Christians even happily used coins embossed with Islamic messages, and North-African Muslims accepted taxes in the form of gold coins imprinted with pictures of the Virgin Mary. Earlier foraging societies (from 70,000 to 12,000 years ago) had no money (and few, if any, possessions). Even early farmers lived in isolated villages and tended to barter goods rather than trade in money. Harari thinks the rise of money as a globally unifying system emerged when people started establishing larger settlements, like cities.
Money is not coins and banknotes. Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services. Yet money existed long before the invention of coinage, and cultures have prospered using other things as currency, such as shells, cattle, skins, salt, grain, beads, cloth and promissory notes. Cowry shells were used as money for about 4,000 years all over Africa, South Asia, East Asia and Oceania.
Even on a small, isolated scale, bartering has its drawbacks, Harari notes that an apple grower might struggle to calculate how many shoes (from the cobbler) a basket of apples is worth, and the two may disagree about how to make that calculation. Harari thinks money, in contrast, is a much more efficient way to facilitate trade and exchange. To Harari, it was “a purely mental revolution,” in which people realized they can use something (including shells, salt, cigarettes, coins, promissory notes, and more) to represent the value of something else. Harari thinks ninety percent of today’s money only exists on computer servers. To Harari, money unifies humanity because everybody trusts in the idea that everybody else wants money.
Universal trust in the value of money enabled diverse and distinct human cultures to morph into a unified economic domain. Harari thinks money is so powerful as a unifying global idea because it’s a simple one. Religions demand that people believe in a complex set of codes, while money, as a concept, only asks people to agree that something—anything, whether its gold or electronic transactions—is universally valuable. Even though many people consider money to be “the root of all evil,” Harari thinks it represents widespread human tolerance. It does, however, have a dark side. Money doesn’t encourage people to trust other humans, but to trust money itself—which leads them to do things like sell people into slavery.
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