Yves here. I trust you will enjoy Michael Hudson’s forward to a new translation of a remarkable old book, Heinrich Schurtz’s Origins of Money. You can download both Hudson’s text and Schurtz’s book for free here. Hudson’s intro below makes clear that this 1897 book reflected anthropological work on the use of money in ancient societies and was early to “unlearn” all the hoary modern-intuition-friendly notions about how the use of money started. I must confess I did not know that Schurtz was also the father of the concept of inside versus outside money.
By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is The Destiny of Civilization
The late 19th century saw economists (mainly German and Austrian) create a mythology of money’s origins that is still being repeated in today’s textbooks. Money is said to have originated as just another commodity being bartered, with metal preferred as a result of being non-perishable (and hence amenable to being saved), supposedly standardized (despite fraud if not minted in temples), and even thought to be easily divisible, as if silver could have been used for small marketplace exchanges, which was unrealistic given the rough character of ancient scales for weights of a few grams.[1]
This mythology does not recognize government as having played any role as a monetary innovator, sponsor or regulator, or as giving money its value by accepting it as a vehicle to pay taxes, buy public services or make religious contributions. Also downplayed is money’s function as a standard of value for denominating and paying debts.[2] Although there is no empirical evidence for the commodity-barter origin myth, it has survived on purely hypothetical grounds because of its political bias that serves the anti-socialist Austrian school and subsequent “free market” creditor interests opposing government money creation.
Schurtz’s Treatment of Money as Part of the Overall Social System
As a founder of economic anthropology, Heinrich Schurtz approached the origins of money as being much more complex than the “economic” view that it emerged simply as a result of families going to the marketplace to barter. Surveying a wide range of indigenous ethnological communities, his 1897 Origins of Money described their trade and money in the context of the institutional system within which members sought status and wealth.
Schurtz described this institutional system as forming the context for exchange and trade, and for monetary systems that involved a wide array of social functions and dimensions, which today’s “economic” theorizing excludes as “externalities,” that is, external to its analytic scope. Placing money in the context of the community’s overall system of social organization, Schurtz warned that anyone who detaches “sociological and economic problems from the foundation on which they grew … in their native soil … only carries away a part of the whole organism and fails to understand the vital forces that have created and sustained it” (p. 117).
Looking at indigenous communities sufficiently isolated to have preserved presumably archaic traditions, Schurtz viewed trade with outsiders as leading wealth to take an increasingly monetary form that eroded social balance, even without taking into account financial wealth in the form of creditor claims for payment, tax obligationsand land rent. Setting “aside the difference between commodities and real estate, which is not considered here” (p. 124), Schurtz deemed the linkage between money, debt and land tenure to lie beyond the area on which he focused, nor did he mention contributions to group feasts (which Bernard Laum would suggest as the germ from which Greek obols and drachmas may have evolved).[3]
Schurtz’s Non-Financial and Non-Fiscal Concept of Money
At issue was how a money economy differs from barter. Was indigenous exchange and wealth pre-monetary, an archaic seed that led to money’s more “fully fledged forms” (p. 5)? The seed to which Schurtz referred involved the exchange of commodities on a relatively small scale, mostly for jewelry and other items of personal adornment, decorations and trophies in the form of shells and gemstones that gave their wearers or owners status.
These were the paradigmatic forms of indigenous wealth, especially foreign exotic products or items with a long and prestigious history. Thorstein Veblen would call the ownership and display of such items conspicuous consumption in his 1899 Theory of the Leisure Class. They had an exchange value, as they do today, but that did not make them monetary means of exchange. Schurtz saw many grey areas in their monetization. “Beads made of clay and stone are also crafted by indigenous people and widely used as ornaments, but rarely as money” (p. 78).
The communities that Schurtz discussed did not use written contracts, keep debt records or use account-keeping in a managerial role for resource allocation, so money’s function as a standard of valuation did not play a role in Schurtz’s survey. But subsequent archeological research has revealed that money’s emergence as part of an overall institutional framework cannot be understood without reference to written account-keeping, denominating debt accruals and fiscal relations. Money, credit/debt and fiscal obligations have all gone together since the origins of written records in the ancient Near East.[4]
Schurtz’s Distinction Between Inside Money and Outside Money
Exchange with outsiders typically was conducted by chieftains as the face of their communities to the outside world. Trade (and also payment of tribute) involved fiscal and social relations whose monetary functions differed from those of the domestic economy but ended up dovetailing with them to give money a hybrid character. Schurtz distinguished what he called outside money from inside money, with outside money ultimately dominating the inside monetary system. “The concept of money,” he wrote (p. 6), originated
from two distinct sources: What functions as the foundation of wealth and measure of value for assets within a tribe and serves social ends is, in its origins, something entirely different from the means of exchange that travel from tribe to tribe and eventually transform themselves, as universally accepted commodity, into a kind of money.
Inside money was used within communities for their own exchange and wealth. Outside money derived from transactions with outsiders. And what was “outside” was a set of practices governing trade outside the jurisdiction of local government.[5] Schurtz’s distinction emphasized a characteristic of trade that has continued down through today’s world: the contrast between domestic payments subject to checks and balances to protect basic needs and recognizing status hierarchies but (ideally) limiting sharp wealth disparities, and exchange with outsiders, often conducted on islands, quay areas or other venues socially outside the community’s boundaries, subject to more impersonal standardized rules.
Throughout the ancient world we find offshore island entrepots wherever these are conveniently located for conducting trade with outsiders. They kept foreign contact at arm’s length so as to prevent mercantile relations from disturbing local economic balance. Egypt restricted foreign contacts to the Delta region where the Nile flowed into the Mediterranean. For the Etruscans, the island of Ischia/Pithekoussai became the base for Phoenician and Greek merchants to deal with the Italian mainland in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. North Germans seem to have conducted the Baltic amber trade by way of the sacred island of Helgoland.
The Tendency of Outside Money to Become General-Purpose Money
“The emergence of particular internal monetary systems is everywhere supported by the inclination to also transform the outside money into inside money,” Schurtz concluded (p. 111). And in his earlier chapter “Metal as Ornament and Money” he pointed out that it was foreign trade that led metal to become the primary form of money. “While most varieties of ornamental money gradually lose their significance, one of them, metal money, asserts its ground all the more, and finally pushes its competitors out of the field” (p. 82). He added that: “Precious metal money is not a pure sign money; it is simultaneously a valuable commodity, whose value depends on supply and demand, because it embodies, in its mature form, the fusion of inside money with outside money, of value signs and value ownership with the means of exchange” (p. 83).[6]
This merging of inside and outside money is documented already in the third millennium BC in the Near East. Silver money was used for long-distance trade and came to be used for domestic enterprise as well, while grain remained the monetary vehicle for denominating agrarian production, taxes and debt service on the land and for distribution to dependent labor in Mesopotamia’s temples and palaces.
Schurtz also posed the question of whether the dominance of metallic money emerged spontaneously in many places, or whether there was a diffusion from a singular origin, that is, “whether a cultural institution has grown in situ or whether it has been transferred from other regions through the migration of and contact between societies” (p. 117). The diffusion of Mesopotamian weights associated with silver points to its diffusion from that region, as does the spread of the region’s practice of setting interest rates simply for ease of calculation in terms of the local fractional arithmetic system (60ths in Mesopotamia for a shekel per mina a month, 10ths or percentages in decimalized Greece. and 12ths in Rome for a troy ounce per pound each year).
Checks and Balances to Prevent the Selfish Concentration of Wealth
What do seem to have developed spontaneously were social attitudes and policies to prevent the concentration of wealth from injuring economic balance. Wealth concentration, especially when achieved by depriving cultivators of their means of livelihood, would have violated the ethic of mutual aid that low-surplus economies need as a condition for their resilience.
Viewing money as part of the overall social context, Schurtz described “the social transformation brought about by wealth” as a result of monetizing trade and its commercial
pursuit of profit [Erwerbssinn]. … everyone is now either compelled to join the competition for assets or they will be pulled into the vortex created by one of the newly emerging centers of power and ownership, and must work hard to be able to live at all. For the owners, there is no temporal boundary hindering the perpetual multiplication of their wealth (p. 38).
Schurtz characterized the economic mentality as a drive for “the unlimited accumulation of movable assets,” to be passed on to one’s children leading to the creation of a wealthy hereditary class. If archaic societies had this ethic, could civilization have taken off? How did they prevent the growth of wealth from fostering an oligarchy seeking to increase its wealth at the expense of the community at large and its resilience.
Schurtz reviewed how indigenous communities typically avoided that fate by shaping a social value system that would steer wealth away from being used to achieve predatory power over others. He cited numerous examples in which “[i]mmense treasures often accumulate without reentering the flow of daily life.”
One widespread way to do this was simply to bury wealth. “The primitive man,” he wrote, “believes he will have access to the mass of goods given to him in the grave, even in the afterlife. Therefore, he also does not know a limit to acquisition” (p. 38). Taking his greed and wealth with him to use in the hereafter prevents hoarded wealth from being inherited “and eventually grow[ing] into a dangerous instrument of power” by becoming dynastic; “it operates on the belief that the deceased does not in any way give up his rights of ownership and jealously guards over his property, so that no heir helps themselves to it” (p. 42).
A less destructive removal of wealth from its owners was to create an ethic of peer pressure in which individuals gained status and popular acclaim by accumulating wealth to give away. “Initially and for a long time,” Schurtz wrote,
remainders of the ancient communism are alive enough to effectively prevent any attempts to amass as many assets as possible into a single hand, and indeed in places without an actual system of debt and interest, the powerful individual, in whose house the tributes of the people flow together, finds himself with little choice but to “display” his wealth or, in other words, to allow the people to participate in its enjoyment. (p. 39, italics added).
Such an individual achieves philanthropic renown by generously distributing his possessions “to his friends and followers, winning their hearts and thereby establishing a popular and genuine power, based on loyal allegiance.” One widespread practice was to celebrate marriages, funerals and other rites of passage by providing great feasts, “an extraordinary dissipation and squandering of owned value, particularly livestock and food, during those grand festivals of the dead that evolved out of sacrifices and are, among some peoples, not only an effective obstacle to the accumulation of wealth, but have turned into economic calamities” when families feel obliged to take on debt to host such extravagant displays (p. 43).
Religious officials and temples often played a role in such rituals. Noting that “money, trade, and religion had a good relationship with one another” in antiquity (p. 35), Schurtz cited the practice of donating wealth to temples or their priesthoods. But he recognized that this might enable them to “gain overpowering influence through the ownership of money” under their control (p. 37).
“In general, the ancient communist countermeasures against wealth do not endure,” Schurtz wrote. “Certain kinds of property seem to favor greed directly, especially cattle farming, which can literally turn into a hoarding addiction” (p. 41). And he described communalistic values of mutual aid as tending to break down as economies polarized with the increase in commercial wealth. Schurtz also noted that the social checks on personal wealth-seeking that he described did not apply to economies that developed a “system of debt and interest” (see p. 39 cited above). Wealth in the form of monetary claims on debtors was not buried, and hardly could be redistributed to the population at large, whose members typically were debtors to the rising creditor interest.
The only way to prevent such debts from polarizing society was to cancel them. That is what Near Eastern rulers did, but Schurtz’s generation had no way of knowing about their Clean Slate proclamations. Starting with the very outset of debt records ca. 2500 BC in Sumer, and continuing down through Babylonia, Assyria and their neighbors down through the early first millennium BC, rulers annulled financial claims on agrarian debtors. That prevented creditors from concentrating money and land in their own hands.
One might say that these debt cancellations and land redistributions were the Near Eastern alternative to destroying material wealth to preserve balance. These royal acts did not destroy physical wealth, but simply wiped out the debt overhead so as to maintain widespread land tenure and liberty for the population at large. Cancelling agrarian debt was politically feasible because most personal debts were owed to the palace sector and its temples or their officials.
Royal Clean Slates seemed so unthinkable when they began to be translated around the turn of the last century that early readers hardly could believe that they actually were enforced in practice. Thureau-Dangin’s French translation of the Sumerian ruler Enmetena’s (ca. 2400 BC) proclamation in 1905 was believed by many observers to be too utopian and socially disruptive to have been followed in practice, as was the Biblical Jubilee Year of Leviticus 25.[7] But so many such proclamations have been found, extending so continuously over thousands of years – along with lawsuits in which judges upheld their increasing detail – that there is no doubt that these acts did indeed reconcile the accumulation of monetary wealth with social resilience by blocking the creation of predatory oligarchies such as would emerge in classical Greece and Rome and indeed survive into today’s world.
Monetary Innovations in the Bronze Age Near Eastern Palaces and Temples
Economic documentation in Schurtz’s day was able to trace monetary practice only as far back as classical Greece and Rome. There was a general belief that their practices must have evolved from indigenous Indo-European speakers. Marcel Mauss would soon treat the gift exchange of the Kwakiutl tribe of the Canadian Pacific Northwest (with their competitive one-upmanship) as the prototype for the idea of charging interest.[8] But monetary interest has a specific stipulated rate, with payments due on specific periodic dates set by written contracts. That practice stems from Sumer in the third millennium BC, along with silver (and grain) money and related financial innovations in the economic Big Bang that has shaped subsequent Western economic evolution.
Near Eastern fiscal and financial records describe a development of money, credit and interest-bearing debt that neither the barter theory nor Schurtz’s ethnographic studies had imagined. Mesopotamia’s “full-fledged” money evolved out of the fiscal organization of account-keeping and credit in the palaces and temples of Sumer, Babylonia and their Bronze Age neighbors (3200-1200 BC).
These Near Eastern economies were larger in scale and much more complex and multi-layered than the indigenous communities surveyed by Schurtz. In contrast to those largely self-sufficient communities, southern Mesopotamia was obliged to engage in large-scale long-distance trade, because the region’s river-deposited soil lacked metal, stone and even hardwood. The region’s needs for raw materials was far different from the trade and “monetization” of luxuries by the relatively small-scale and self-sufficient communities studied by Schurtz and hypothesized by economists imagining individuals bartering at their local market. In these communities, he noted: “Almost always the amount of metal shaped into ornaments far outweighs the amount transformed into practical tools”(p. 82). Mesopotamia’s trade had to go far beyond personal decorative luxuries and prestige commodities or trophy items.
An entrepreneurial merchant class was needed to obtain these raw materials, along with a specialized labor force, which was employed by the temples and palaces that produced most export handicrafts, provisioned corvée labor to work on public infrastructure, served as mints and overseers of weights and measures, and mediated most monetary wealth and debt. Their large scale required forward planning and account-keeping to feed and supply labor (war widows, orphans and slaves) in their weaving and other handicraft workshops, and to consign their output to merchants for export.
Calculating the cost of distributing food and raw materials within these large institutions and valuing their consignment of goods to merchants required designing standard weights and measures as the basis for this forward planning. Selecting monetary units was basically part of this standardization of measuring costs and value. This made possible calculation of expected rental income or shortfalls, along with profit-and-loss statements and balance sheets.
The typical commodity to be distributed was grain, which served as a standard of value for agrarian transactions and credit balances that mounted up during the crop year for advances to sharecroppers, consumption such as beer from ale-women, and payments to priests for performing ceremonial functions. Their value in grain was to be paid at harvest time. Calculation of food rations for distribution to the various grades of labor (male, female and children) enabled the costs to be expressed in grain or in workday equivalents.
Schurtz would have called this grain “inside money,” and regarded as “outside money” the silver minted by temples for dealing with foreign trade and as the basic measure of value for business transactions with the palace economy and for settling commercial obligations. A mina (60 shekels) of silver was set as equal to a corresponding unit of grain as measured on the threshing floor. That enabled accounts to be kept simultaneously in silver and grain. The result was a bimonetary grain-silver standard reflecting the bifurcation of early Mesopotamian economies between the agrarian families on the land (using grain “inside money”) and the palatial economy with its workshops, foreign trade and associated commercial enterprise (using silver “outside money”). Prices for market transactions with outsiders might vary, but prices for debt payments, taxes and other transactions with the large institutions were fixed.
Schurtz’s conclusion that the rising dominance of commercial money tended to break down domestic checks and balances protecting the indigenous communities that he studied is indeed what happened when commercial debt practices were brought from the Near East to the Aegean and Mediterranean lands around the 8th century BC. Having no tradition of royal debt cancellations as had existed in the Near East ever since the formative period of interest-bearing debt, the resulting decontextualization of credit practices fostered financial oligarchies in classical Greece and Rome. After early debt cancellations and land redistribution by populist “tyrants” in the 7th and 6th centuries BC, the ensuing classical oligarchies resisted popular revolts demanding a revival of such policies.
The dynamics of interest-bearing debt and the pro-creditor debt laws of classical antiquity’s creditor oligarchies caused economic polarization that led to five centuries of civil warfare. These upheavals were not the result of the coinage that began to be minted around the 8th century BC, as many 19th-century observers believed, mistakenly thinking that Aegean coinage was the first metallic money. Silver money had been the norm for two millennia throughout the Near East, without causing disruption like that experienced by classical antiquity. What polarized classical antiquity’s economies were pro-creditor debt laws backed by political violence, not money as such.
Conclusion and Discussion
Schurtz’s starting point was how communities organized the laws of motion governing their distribution of wealth and property. He viewed money as emerging from this institutional function with a basically communalistic ethic. A key characteristic of indigenous economic resilience was social pressure expecting the wealthy to contribute to social support. That was the condition set by unwritten customs for letting some individuals and their families become rich. Schurtz and subsequent ethnologists found a universal solution for reconciling wealth-seeking with community-wide prosperity to be social pressure for wealthy families (that was the basic unit, not individuals) to distribute their wealth to the citizenry by gift exchange, mutual aid and providing large feasts, especially for rites of passage.
This was a much broader view than the individualistic economic assumption that personal gain-seeking and indeed selfishness was the driving force of overall prosperity. The idea of monetizing economic life under communalistic mutual-aid or palace direction was and remains anathema to mainstream economists, reflecting the worldview of modern creditors and financial elites. Schurtz recognized that mercantile wealth-seeking required checks and balances to prevent economies from impoverishing their members. The problem for any successfully growing society to solve was how to prevent the undue concentration of wealth obtained by exploitative means that impaired overall welfare and the ability of community members to be self-supporting. Otherwise, economic polarization and dependency would lead members to flee from the community, or perhaps it simply would shrink and end up being defeated by outsiders who sustained themselves by more successful mutual aid.
As noted above, Schurtz treated the monetization of wealth in the form of creditor claims on debtors as too post-archaic to be a characteristic of his ethnographic subjects. But what shaped the context for monetization and led “outside money” to take priority over inside money were wealth accumulation by moneylending and the fiscal and military uses of money.
Schurtz correctly rejected (p. 6) the characterization of money as developing in stages, from small-scale barter to monetized economies becoming more sophisticated as they evolved into financialized credit economies.[9] And in fact the actual historical sequence was the reverse. From Mesopotamia to medieval Europe, agrarian economies operated on credit during the crop year. Monetary payment occurred at harvest time to settle the obligations that had accumulated since the last harvest and to pay taxes. This need to pay debts was a major factor requiring money’s development in the first place.
Barter became antiquity’s final monetary “stage” as Rome’s economy collapsed after its creditor oligarchy imposed debt bondage and took control of the land. When emperors were unable to tax this oligarchy, they debased the coinage and life throughout the Empire devolved into local subsistence production and quasi-barter. Foreign trade was mainly for luxuries brought by Arabs and other Near Easterners. The optimistic sequence that Hildebrand imagined not only mistakenly adopted the barter myth of monetary origins, but failed to take debt polarization into account as economies became monetarized and financialized.
Schurtz described how the aim of preventing the maldistribution of wealth was at the heart of indigenous social structuring. But it broke down for various reasons. Economies in which family wealth took the form of cattle, he found, tended to become increasingly oppressive in order to maintain the polarizing inequality that developed. The same might be said of credit economies under the rising burden of interest-bearing debt. Schurtz noted the practice of charging debtors double the loan value – and any rate of interest indeed involves an implicit doubling time. That exponential dynamic is what polarizes financialized economies.
Mainstream economists of Schurtz’s generation avoided dealing with the effect of monetary innovation and debt on the distribution of wealth. The tendency was to treat money as merely a “veil” of price changes for goods and services, without analyzing how credit polarizes the economy’s balance sheet of assets and debt liabilities. Yet the distinguishing feature of credit economies was the use of moneylending as a lever to enrich creditors by impoverishing debtors. That was more than just a monetary problem. It was a political creditor/debtor problem, and ultimately a public/private problem. At issue was whether a ruler or civic public checks would steer the rise in monetary wealth in ways that avoided the creation of creditor oligarchies.
Most 19th-century and even subsequent economic writers shied from confronting this political context, leaving it the most glaring gap in modern economic analysis. It was left to the discovery of cuneiform documentation to understand how money first became institutionalized as a vehicle to pay debts. This monetization was accompanied by a remarkable success in sustaining rising wealth while preventing its concentration in the hands of a hereditary oligarchy.
That Near Eastern success highlights what the smaller and more anarchic Western economies failed to achieve when interest-bearing debt practices were brought to the Mediterranean lands without being checked by the tradition of regular cancellation of personal non-business debt. Credit and monetary wealth were privatized in the hands of what became an increasingly self-destructive set of classical oligarchies culminating in that of Rome which fought for centuries against popular revolts seeking protection from impoverishing economic polarization.
The devastating effects of transplanting Near Eastern debt practices into the Mediterranean world’s less communalistic groupings shows the need to discuss the political, fiscal and social-moral context for money and debt. Schurtz placed monetary analysis in the context of society’s political institutions and moral values, and explained how money is a product of this context, and indeed, how monetization tends to transform it – in a way that tends to break down social protection.
His book has remained relatively unknown over the last century largely because his institutional anthropological perspective is too broad for an economics discipline that has been narrowed by pro-creditor ideologues who have applauded the “free market” destruction of social regulation aimed at protecting the interests of debtors. That attitude avoids recognizing the challenges that led the indigenous communities studied by Schurtz, and later the formative Bronze Age Near East, to protect their resilience against the concentration of wealth, a phenomenon that has plagued economies ever since classical antiquity’s decontextualization of Near Eastern debt practices.
_______
[1] Carl Menger, “On the Origins of Money,” Economic Journal, 2 (1892):238-255 [Original in 1871]. The barter theory has been refuted by modern research uncovering the Bronze Age Near Eastern institutional origins of money, which I discuss in Chapters 1 and 3 of Temples of Enterprise: Creating Economic Order in the Bronze Age Near East (Dresden, ISLET, 2024), esp. my criticisms of this theory in “Origins of Money and Interest: Palatial Credit, not Barter,” in Battilossi, S., Cassis, Y., Yago, K., eds., Handbook of the History of Money and Currency(Springer, 2020):45-65.
[2] See the papers collected in L. Randall Wray, ed., Credit and State Theories of Money: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes (Cheltenham UK, 2004).
[3] Marcel Mauss, The Gift (New York, 1952 [1925]), and Bernard Laum, Heiliges Geld: eine historiche Untersuchung über den sakralen Ursprung des Geldes (Tübingen, 1924). Schurtz mentions spit-money in passing but finds trade in food relatively unimportant.
[4] See “The Development of Money-of-Account in Sumer’s Temples,” in Michael Hudson and Cornelia Wunsch, eds., Creating Economic Order: Record-Keeping, Standardization and the Development of Accounting in the Ancient Near East (CDL Press, Bethesda, 2004, now ISLET, Dresden, 2023):303-329.
[5] I discuss this in “From Sacred Enclave to Temple to City,” in Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East (ed. with Baruch Levine, Cambridge, Mass: Peabody Museum (Harvard), 1999):117-146, and Chapter 10 of Temples of Enterprise.
[6] Schurtz (pp. 28-29) cited as an example of how monetary authorities could substitute sign money for metal money the case of “Kublai Khan, the ruler of the Mongolian empire, [who] drove out metal money with sign money, specifically stamped pieces of paper, evidently following the Chinese example; Marco Polo’s accounts indicate that the endeavor must have temporarily succeeded in light of the tremendous power and authority of the ruler, with the result being a vast accumulation of gold and silver in the Khan’s residence.” But he made disparaging remarks about the French government’s paper money assignats and called John Law a fraudster, dismissing government money creation.
[7] Francois Thureau-Dangin, Les Inscriptions de Sumer et d’Akkad (Paris, 1905):86-87 translated the Sumerian term for justice (amargi) to mean specifically that officials and wealthy individuals (“the powerful”) would have no legal claims for debt foreclosure.
[8] Marcel Mauss, The Gift (New York, 1952 [1925]).
[9] Bruno Hildebrand, “Natural-, Geld- und Kreditwirtschaft,” Jahrbücher für Nationalokönomie und Statistik 6 (1864) classified economies as passing from Naturalwirtschaft (barter economy) to Geldwirtschaft (gold/commodity money economy) and finally Kreditwirtschaft (credit economy).
