Sapiens: a brief History of Humankind

25.
 Sioux chiefs (1905). Neither the Sioux nor any other Great Plains tribe had horses prior to 1492
.
Homo sapiens
evolved to think of people as divided into us and them. ‘Us’ was
the group immediately around you, whoever you were, and ‘them’ was everyone

---

else. In fact, no social animal is ever guided by the interests of the entire species
to which it belongs. No chimpanzee cares about the interests of the chimpanzee
species, no snail will lift a tentacle for the global snail community, no lion alpha
male makes a bid for becoming the king of all lions, and at the entrance of no
beehive can one find the slogan: ‘Worker bees of the world – unite!’
But beginning with the Cognitive Revolution, 
Homo sapiens
became more and
more exceptional in this respect. People began to cooperate on a regular basis
with complete strangers, whom they imagined as ‘brothers’ or ‘friends’. Yet this
brotherhood was not universal. Somewhere in the next valley, or beyond the
mountain range, one could still sense ‘them’. When the rst pharaoh, Menes,
united Egypt around 3000 
BC
, it was clear to the Egyptians that Egypt had a
border, and beyond the border lurked ‘barbarians’. The barbarians were alien,
threatening, and interesting only to the extent that they had land or natural
resources that the Egyptians wanted. All the imagined orders people created
tended to ignore a substantial part of humankind.
The rst millennium 
BC
witnessed the appearance of three potentially universal
orders, whose devotees could for the rst time imagine the entire world and the
entire human race as a single unit governed by a single set of laws. Everyone was
‘us’, at least potentially. There was no longer ‘them’. The rst universal order to
appear was economic: the monetary order. The second universal order was
political: the imperial order. The third universal order was religious: the order of
universal religions such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.
Merchants, conquerors and prophets were the rst people who managed to
transcend the binary evolutionary division, ‘us vs them’, and to foresee the
potential unity of humankind. For the merchants, the entire world was a single
market and all humans were potential customers. They tried to establish an
economic order that would apply to all, everywhere. For the conquerors, the
entire world was a single empire and all humans were potential subjects, and for
the prophets, the entire world held a single truth and all humans were potential
believers. They too tried to establish an order that would be applicable for
everyone everywhere.
During the last three millennia, people made more and more ambitious attempts
to realise that global vision. The next three chapters discuss how money, empires
and universal religions spread, and how they laid the foundation of the united
world of today. We begin with the story of the greatest conqueror in history, a
conqueror possessed of extreme tolerance and adaptability, thereby turning
people into ardent disciples. This conqueror is money. People who do not believe
in the same god or obey the same king are more than willing to use the same
money. Osama Bin Laden, for all his hatred of American culture, American
religion and American politics, was very fond of American dollars. How did

---

money succeed where gods and kings failed?

---

10
The Scent of Money
IN 1519 HERNÁN CORTÉS AND HIS CONQUISTADORS invaded Mexico, hitherto
an isolated human world. The Aztecs, as the people who lived there called
themselves, quickly noticed that the aliens showed an extraordinary interest in a
certain yellow metal. In fact, they never seemed to stop talking about it. The
natives were not unfamiliar with gold – it was pretty and easy to work, so they
used it to make jewellery and statues, and they occasionally used gold dust as a
medium of exchange. But when an Aztec wanted to buy something, he generally
paid in cocoa beans or bolts of cloth. The Spanish obsession with gold thus seemed
inexplicable. What was so important about a metal that could not be eaten, drunk
or woven, and was too soft to use for tools or weapons? When the natives
questioned Cortés as to why the Spaniards had such a passion for gold, the
conquistador answered, ‘Because I and my companions suffer from a disease of the
heart which can be cured only with gold.’
1
In the Afro-Asian world from which the Spaniards came, the obsession for gold
was indeed an epidemic. Even the bitterest of enemies lusted after the same
useless yellow metal. Three centuries before the conquest of Mexico, the ancestors
of Cortés and his army waged a bloody war of religion against the Muslim
kingdoms in Iberia and North Africa. The followers of Christ and the followers of
Allah killed each other by the thousands, devastated elds and orchards, and
turned prosperous cities into smouldering ruins – all for the greater glory of Christ
or Allah.
As the Christians gradually gained the upper hand, they marked their victories
not only by destroying mosques and building churches,but also by issuing new
gold and silver coins bearing the sign of the cross and thanking God for His help
in combating the in dels. Yet alongside the new currency, the victors minted
another type of coin, called the millares, which carried a somewhat di erent
message. These square coins made by the Christian conquerors were emblazoned
with owing Arabic script that declared: ‘There is no god except Allah, and
Muhammad is Allah’s messenger.’ Even the Catholic bishops of Melgueil and Agde
issued these faithful copies of popular Muslim coins, and God-fearing Christians
happily used them.
2

---

Tolerance ourished on the other side of the hill too. Muslim merchants in North
Africa conducted business using Christian coins such as the Florentine orin, the
Venetian ducat and the Neapolitan gigliato. Even Muslim rulers who called for
jihad against the in del Christians were glad to receive taxes in coins that invoked
Christ and His Virgin Mother.
3
How Much is It?
Hunter-gatherers had no money. Each band hunted, gathered and manufactured
almost everything it required, from meat to medicine, from sandals to sorcery.
Di erent band members may have specialised in di erent tasks, but they shared
their goods and services through an economy of favours and obligations. A piece
of meat given for free would carry with it the assumption of reciprocity – say, free
medical assistance. The band was economically independent; only a few rare
items that could not be found locally – seashells, pigments, obsidian and the like –
had to be obtained from strangers. This could usually be done by simple barter:
‘We’ll give you pretty seashells, and you’ll give us high-quality flint.’
Little of this changed with the onset of the Agricultural Revolution. Most people
continued to live in small, intimate communities. Much like a hunter-gatherer
band, each village was a self-su cient economic unit, maintained by mutual
favours and obligations plus a little barter with outsiders. One villager may have
been particularly adept at making shoes, another at dispensing medical care, so
villagers knew where to turn when barefoot or sick. But villages were small and
their economies limited, so there could be no full-time shoemakers and doctors.
The rise of cities and kingdoms and the improvement in transport infrastructure
brought about new opportunities for specialisation. Densely populated cities
provided full-time employment not just for professional shoemakers and doctors,
but also for carpenters, priests, soldiers and lawyers. Villages that gained a
reputation for producing really good wine, olive oil or ceramics discovered that it
was worth their while to specialise nearly exclusively in that product and trade it
with other settlements for all the other goods they needed. This made a lot of
sense. Climates and soils differ, so why drink mediocre wine from your backyard if
you can buy a smoother variety from a place whose soil and climate is much
better suited to grape vines? If the clay in your backyard makes stronger and
prettier pots, then you can make an exchange. Furthermore, full-time specialist
vintners and potters, not to mention doctors and lawyers, can hone their expertise
to the bene t of all. But specialisation created a problem – how do you manage
the exchange of goods between the specialists?

---

An economy of favours and obligations doesn’t work when large numbers of
strangers try to cooperate. It’s one thing to provide free assistance to a sister or a
neighbour, a very di erent thing to take care of foreigners who might never
reciprocate the favour. One can fall back on barter. But barter is e ective only
when exchanging a limited range of products. It cannot form the basis for a
complex economy.
4
In order to understand the limitations of barter, imagine that you own an apple
orchard in the hill country that produces the crispest, sweetest apples in the entire
province. You work so hard in your orchard that your shoes wear out. So you
harness up your donkey cart and head to the market town down by the river. Your
neighbour told you that a shoemaker on the south end of the marketplace made
him a really sturdy pair of boots that’s lasted him through ve seasons. You nd
the shoemaker’s shop and o er to barter some of your apples in exchange for the
shoes you need.
The shoemaker hesitates. How many apples should he ask for in payment?
Every day he encounters dozens of customers, a few of whom bring along sacks of
apples, while others carry wheat, goats or cloth – all of varying quality. Still
others o er their expertise in petitioning the king or curing backaches. The last
time the shoemaker exchanged shoes for apples was three months ago, and back
then he asked for three sacks of apples. Or was it four? But come to think of it,
those apples were sour valley apples, rather than prime hill apples. On the other
hand, on that previous occasion, the apples were given in exchange for small
women’s shoes. This fellow is asking for man-size boots. Besides, in recent weeks a
disease has decimated the ocks around town, and skins are becoming scarce. The
tanners are starting to demand twice as many nished shoes in exchange for the
same quantity of leather. Shouldn’t that be taken into consideration?
In a barter economy, every day the shoemaker and the apple grower will have
to learn anew the relative prices of dozens of commodities. If one hundred
di erent commodities are traded in the market, then buyers and sellers will have
to know 4,950 di erent exchange rates. And if 1,000 di erent commodities are
traded, buyers and sellers must juggle 499,500 di erent exchange rates!
5
 How do
you figure it out?
It gets worse. Even if you manage to calculate how many apples equal one pair
of shoes, barter is not always possible. After all, a trade requires that each side
want what the other has to o er. What happens if the shoemaker doesn’t like
apples and, if at the moment in question, what he really wants is a divorce? True,
the farmer could look for a lawyer who likes apples and set up a three-way deal.
But what if the lawyer is full up on apples but really needs a haircut?
Some societies tried to solve the problem by establishing a central barter system
that collected products from specialist growers and manufacturers and distributed

---

them to those who needed them. The largest and most famous such experiment
was conducted in the Soviet Union, and it failed miserably. ‘Everyone would work
according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs’ turned out in
practice into ‘everyone would work as little as they can get away with, and
receive as much as they could grab’. More moderate and more successful
experiments were made on other occasions, for example in the Inca Empire. Yet
most societies found a more easy way to connect large numbers of experts – they
developed money.
Shells and Cigarettes
Money was created many times in many places. Its development required no
technological breakthroughs – it was a purely mental revolution. It involved the
creation of a new inter-subjective reality that exists solely in people’s shared
imagination.
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. Money enables people to compare quickly and
easily the value of di erent commodities (such as apples, shoes and divorces), to
easily exchange one thing for another, and to store wealth conveniently. There
have been many types of money. The most familiar is the coin, which is a
standardised piece of imprinted metal. 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. Taxes could still be paid in cowry shells in British Uganda in
the early twentieth century.

---