Access Signs and the Emergence of Monetary Function

Davud A. Zulumkhanov

Abstract

This article proposes an institutionalist-evolutionary hypothesis about the emergence of monetary function. Rather than choosing between commodity, credit and chartalist accounts, it distinguishes three analytical questions that are often run together: what functions money performs, what threshold turns a non-monetary sign into a monetary one, and what historical objects illustrate the process. Commodity theories emphasise saleability; credit and chartalist theories emphasise debt, unit of account, taxation and public authority. The hypothesis developed here focuses on a different threshold: the moment when a local debt sign, accounting mark or access credential becomes detachable from its original relation, can be presented by another holder, and has a credible path to repeated acceptance among strangers. The article argues that a unit of account may arise locally before money through customary equivalences, debt measurement, rations, dues, fines and processing obligations; monetary function emerges only when signs measured in or convertible into such units become transferable beyond the local community. The method is ideal-typical and based on analytic narrative. The argument distinguishes four stages from ordinary community to administered fair, port, crossroads or town, and assesses the hypothesis against commodity and chartalist accounts through medieval bracteate coinage, jurisdictional boundaries, stamp-premium decay, Rosenswig's tally-stick evidence and Selgin's Birmingham tokens. Coinage is treated as a historically powerful crystallisation of a wider process of recognition, transferability and administered access.

Keywords: origin of money; monetary function; access signs; evolutionary political economy; institutional economics.

JEL: B52; E42; N10.

1. The Problem

The origin of money is usually posed as the question of why a particular commodity becomes a general medium of exchange. In the classical Mengerian account, the answer is built around differences in the saleability of goods: some goods are easier to exchange than others, so participants in exchange gradually begin to accept them not for immediate consumption, but for subsequent exchange (Menger, 1892). In the Misesian version, this line is supplemented by the regression theorem: the purchasing power of money must be connected to a prior non-monetary value of the commodity (Mises, 1953). Credit and chartalist theories, by contrast, emphasise debt, account, obligation, taxation and public authority. In Innes, Knapp, Ingham, Desan and Graeber, money appears not simply as a commodity, but as a social relation, a record of obligation or a legal form (Innes, 1913; Knapp, 1924; Ingham, 2004; Desan, 2014; Graeber, 2011). Rosenswig's (2025) comparative study of state-issued tally sticks in medieval England, imperial China and the Classic Maya world extends this chartalist line with new archaeological and historical evidence, arguing that independently invented state accounting devices converge on the same fiscal function across three unrelated civilizations.

These approaches explain important aspects of money, but they leave one intermediate question insufficiently developed: how does a non-monetary sign, object or record acquire the capacity to circulate among strangers? Inside a local community, a debt record can work because participants know the debtor, remember the circumstances of the obligation and share customary sanctions. Once such a sign leaves the local system, however, its force is weakened. A stranger at a fair does not know who owes what, whether the obligation is valid, whether it can be enforced, or whether it will be recognised beyond its original environment.

This article proposes to shift the question. Money need not arise because participants already understand the need for a general medium of exchange. Monetary function can emerge retrospectively when a sign originally created for a non-monetary purpose becomes transferable among participants and accepted beyond its initial function. Admission marks, toll receipts, storage tokens, personal passes, customs stamps, accounting tallies, goods marks and metal tokens are therefore not treated as equivalent origins of money. They are possible starting points whose monetary potential depends on whether the issuer's recognition becomes detachable from the original person, act or consignment.

The main claim of the article is therefore not that coinage is logically necessary. That claim would be historically false: ingots, shells, cattle, account records, debt instruments and Chinese silver ingots all show that monetary function can stabilise in different forms. The central claim is different: an access sign or accounting mark can become monetary only when it is detachable from the relation for which it was first issued and repeatedly accepted through a credible return path. Coinage is only one, albeit historically powerful, form of this process.

The contribution is threefold. First, the article identifies a missing institutional threshold between local debt and impersonal monetary circulation. Second, it explains why access, admission, tolls, storage and certification are not marginal administrative details but possible carriers of monetary function. Third, it distinguishes this threshold from both commodity selection and fiscal imposition, and specifies, in Section 9, an empirical test that separates the three accounts.

This framing is closer to political economy than to a pure theory of exchange. It continues Polanyi's line of argument, for which the market is an instituted, organised and embedded process rather than a natural scene of individual exchange (Polanyi, 1944, 1963). It also belongs to the broader institutional tradition, from Veblen and Commons through Hayek, North, Greif and Hodgson, which treats economic institutions as cumulative, partly intended and partly emergent results of human action (Veblen, 1898; Commons, 1934; Hayek, 1973; North, 1990; Greif, 2006; Hodgson, 2004). Finally, it allows us to preserve the strengths of Menger and Mises without turning their explanation of the commodity layer of money into a complete explanation of the emergence of monetary function, and to preserve the strengths of chartalism without treating fiscal imposition as the only route by which a sign can acquire monetary standing.

2. Dialogue With the Evolutionary and Institutional Literature on Money

The article enters several ongoing debates in evolutionary, institutional and heterodox political economy. It does not seek to enter all of them in equal depth; it locates itself in relation to six lines.

The first line is the evolutionary and institutional tradition itself, in which the present article is most directly situated. From Veblen and Commons through Schumpeter, Nelson and Winter, North, Hodgson and Greif, this tradition treats economic institutions, including monetary ones, as cumulative results of human practice, partly intended and partly emergent (Veblen, 1898; Commons, 1934; Schumpeter, 1983; Nelson and Winter, 1982; North, 1990; Hodgson, 2004; Greif, 2006). Nelson and Winter's evolutionary theory of economic change, Hodgson's evolutionary institutional economics, North's analysis of institutional change and Greif's institutional analysis of medieval Mediterranean commerce all support the treatment of monetary practices as institutional artefacts whose stability rests on shared recognition and repeated use rather than on the intrinsic properties of any underlying commodity. The hypothesis developed here applies this evolutionary-institutional lens to the specific question of how a non-monetary sign acquires monetary function. It treats monetary function as an emergent institutional property: a sign created for one purpose can acquire a new function through repeated use, selection, stabilisation and recognition.

The second line treats money as a social relation and as a socially positioned form. It is associated above all with Ingham and the subsequent controversy around the credit theory of money. In this line, money is understood not as a thing in itself, but as a structure of rights, obligations and recognition within a monetary community (Ingham, 2004; Lawson, 2016, 2018). Lawson's work on social positioning theory, Ingham's critique, and the articles by Searle and Peacock on the social ontology of money show that this debate treats money as an institutionally positioned object rather than as a physical thing with self-sufficient moneyness (Searle, 2017; Peacock, 2017). Rosenswig's recent analysis of ancient tally sticks makes a similar point from historical material: tallies are not money because of their substance, but because they can be placed within an administered structure of record, obligation and cancellation (Rosenswig, 2025). The present article accepts this starting point but asks a prior and more specific question: how can a sign that is not yet money be positioned so that strangers begin to accept it?

The third line is chartalism and the state theory of money. Bell's article on the role of the state and the hierarchy of money showed that the state's capacity to establish and enforce tax obligations makes state money the most acceptable debt within a monetary hierarchy (Bell, 2001). The work of Nersisyan, Wray and Tymoigne connects the chartalist approach to endogenous money theory (Nersisyan and Wray, 2016; Tymoigne, 2016). Rosenswig's (2025) tally-stick evidence, discussed further in Section 9, extends this line with a strong comparative-historical case for fiscal origins in three independent civilizations. For the present article, this claim is important but requires cautious extension. The state is not the only possible issuer of recognised signs. Before the full fiscal state, or alongside it, signs of access may be issued by a fair authority, monastery, town government, customs office, temple, ruler, port administration or owner of a trading space. Tax acceptance is therefore not a rejection of the access-sign hypothesis, but one of the later and most powerful cases of a broader logic of administered admission, a claim examined against documented evidence in Section 9.

The fourth line is endogenous money and post-Keynesian theory of bank credit. In this line Lavoie, Fontana, Chick, Dow and Tymoigne explore bank money creation, the temporal sequence of payments and the coordination of the treasury with the central bank (Chick, 1992; Lavoie, 1999; Fontana, 2004; Dow, 2017; Tymoigne, 2016). This literature does not directly explain the primary origin of monetary function, but it is methodologically important: money arises within economic and institutional processes rather than being introduced from outside as a neutral technical object. It also cautions against treating access signs as a complete account of money creation. The access-sign hypothesis concerns the institutional threshold at which a sign becomes acceptable among strangers; endogenous money theory concerns a later and continuing process in which banks and balance sheets create spendable claims denominated in an already recognised unit of account. The two processes are connected but analytically distinct.

The fifth line is the literature on small change, private tokens and the institutional production of coin-like acceptability. Sargent and Velde show why the denomination structure of coinage mattered for everyday exchange, while Selgin's account of Birmingham button makers and the Royal Mint shows that private and semi-private token coinage could solve practical shortages where official coinage failed (Sargent and Velde, 2002; Selgin, 2008). These cases are important because they prevent the argument from becoming state-centred. The issuer of a recognised sign need not always be the fiscal state; it may also be a firm, mint, fair authority, local office or network whose tokens solve a concrete problem of acceptance.

The sixth line is digital money, stablecoins, crypto-assets and CBDC. Recent work on whether crypto-assets can be money, on stablecoins, and on the political ontology of digital tokens raises the same underlying question, the conditions under which a non-monetary sign can acquire a monetary function, in contemporary terms (Morgan, 2023; Rector and Allen, 2023; Culham, 2023; Mortágua, 2026). The present article preserves its historical focus and mentions this issue only in the conclusion as a separate field for future research.

Thus, the article does not seek to replace existing debates about money. Within an evolutionary-institutional research programme, it proposes a missing historical-institutional level of analysis: the mechanism through which local debt, social recognition and administered access can generate a transferable sign that is not initially money, but becomes monetary through repeated transfer and a credible expectation of acceptance among strangers.

3. Method, Scope and the Comparison of Thresholds

The argument is not a universal history of money and should not be read as a claim that all societies pass through the same sequence. It is an ideal-typical reconstruction of one recurrent route into monetary function. Its purpose is analytical: to isolate the institutional conditions under which a non-monetary sign can become transferable and acceptable beyond the relation for which it was first issued.

This method is deliberately pluralist. The Austrian tradition generally proceeds from methodological individualism and deductive reconstruction: it asks how actors, facing exchange difficulties, would converge on a more saleable commodity. Credit, chartalist and post-Keynesian approaches usually begin from social relations, balance sheets, units of account, state obligations and endogenous institutional processes. The present article cannot dissolve all methodological disagreement between these schools. It instead uses an ideal type to identify a narrower mechanism that can be assessed across them: a sign created for debt, admission, storage, toll payment or certification may acquire a new function when it becomes transferable and repeatedly accepted by third parties.

The reasoning is therefore retroductive as well as historical. It begins from a recurrent puzzle: objects that were not originally money sometimes become money-like when they are positioned inside a wider order of recognition. It then asks what conditions would make that transition possible. The answer proposed here is not "saleability alone" and not "state command alone", but a threshold of impersonal recognisability. The sign must be understood by persons who did not participate in the original relation.

The mechanism is conditional. A local sign does not become monetary merely because it is material, durable or issued by an authority. In this article, an access sign means a portable or recordable sign that certifies a right, permission, clearance or recognised standing within an administered order of movement, exchange or settlement. This definition is narrower than the list of all marks, seals and tokens. A warehouse tag that merely identifies stored goods, a personal safe-conduct that cannot be transferred, a sacred badge tied to status, or a mark valid only for one inspection is not yet an access sign in the monetary sense. It becomes relevant to monetary origins only if it can be detached from the original person or act and presented by another holder within a recognised order.

Three transitions must occur. First, the sign must become detachable from a purely personal obligation. Second, it must be linked to a recognisable order of admission, account, passage, storage, certification or settlement. Third, it must acquire a repeat-use acceptance mechanism: third parties accept it not simply because others accept it, but because they expect at least one reliable return path, such as entry to the same fair, payment of a toll, settlement of dues, recovery of stored goods, redemption by an issuer, acceptance by a court or office, or resale to persons facing the same access problem. Without the first transition, the sign remains a debt record. Without the second, it remains a private object. Without the third, it remains an access credential or administrative receipt rather than money.

A further distinction is necessary. A merchant-access sign attaches recognition to a person: permission to enter a fair, use a route, occupy a stall, claim safe-conduct, pass a gate or receive exemption from local dues. A goods-access sign attaches recognition to an object or load: customs clearance, taxed status, assayed metal, stored grain, a sealed package or a warehouse claim. These signs solve different problems and have different limits. A merchant-access sign normally remains personal unless another bearer may use it; a goods-access sign normally remains attached to a consignment unless the recognised claim to the goods, storage right or certified material can be transferred. A monetary sign is a third and narrower case: it carries an issuer's recognition in a form that can pass from holder to holder without being exhausted by one trader's entry or one load's inspection.

This distinction matters for the historical cases below. Clay tokens, fair records, tamga, paiza, bills, receipts, ingots and assay marks do not all have the same status. Some are pre-monetary accounting devices; some are access credentials; some are instruments of settlement; some are monetary objects. The hypothesis is not confirmed by simply finding material signs. It is supported when one can show a movement from local inscription to institutional recognition and then to repeated acceptance among persons who do not share the original social relation. It is weakened where signs remain personal, non-transferable, status-bound or limited to a single act of admission.

The following table states the difference between function, threshold and canonical examples more explicitly.

The table is not meant to rank the three accounts. It isolates different thresholds. The commodity account explains why some objects become more exchangeable than others and why purely arbitrary money is unstable. The credit and chartalist account explains why accounting, taxation, public obligation and hierarchy matter. The access-sign hypothesis addresses a narrower intermediate problem: how a non-monetary sign, record or credential becomes detachable from its original relation and acceptable to a stranger who was not part of the initial obligation.

The same logic applies, at a more basic level, to the persons who carry, accept and enforce such signs. Exchange among strangers presupposes not only transferable objects, but also persons whose standing can be recognised beyond kin memory and face-to-face reputation. A monetary sign can circulate impersonally only where its holders are themselves treated as recognisable participants in an order of obligation, access and settlement. The present article does not develop a theory of legal personhood, but it assumes this adjacent threshold: the emergence of money and the emergence of contract-capable personhood belong to the same wider institutional problem of making recognition portable among strangers.

4. Why Village Barter Is Not the Beginning

The story of the origin of money in village barter is methodologically convenient but anthropologically weak. It assumes that, inside a small community, there already exist independent owners, alienable things, regular exchange among strangers or near-strangers, and a calculation problem of the double coincidence of wants. Yet these are precisely the conditions that need to be explained. In a traditional community, things are often embedded not in a market, but in kinship, status, obligation, use, ritual and collective belonging.

Graeber rightly criticises the myth of barter: there is no convincing evidence that money emerged as a convenient solution for villagers tired of exchanging shoes for grain (Graeber, 2011). Graeber and Wengrow extend this criticism by treating early social arrangements as institutionally varied rather than as steps in a single evolutionary sequence from simple barter to markets and states (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021). Inside a community, exchange is often not separate from relations of reciprocity, memory, debt, assistance and hierarchy. People may remember who helped whom, who received what, and who owes what kind of return, but this need not take the form of a market transaction among independent owners.

Schmandt-Besserat's work on Near Eastern clay tokens sharpens this point (Schmandt-Besserat, 1992). Her evidence does not show the origin of money in the strict sense. It shows something narrower and more useful for the present argument: small material counters could record quantities, goods and obligations before alphabetic writing and before coined money. The token is therefore not yet a medium of exchange. It is a device for making account and obligation materially durable. Its importance lies in showing that the history of monetary function cannot be reduced either to commodity choice or to state coinage; it also passes through techniques of accounting, marking and transferable recognition.

Credit theory, however, has its own limit. It explains well why debt and account precede coinage, but it explains less well how a local debt sign becomes transferable among strangers. A debt record has a particular owner: it refers to a specific debtor, a specific creditor, a specific occasion and a specific system of sanctions. Such a sign is relationally anchored. Its force derives from concrete persons, remembered histories and recognised obligations.

Money requires another mechanism. A monetary sign cannot refer each time to the biography of a particular debtor. It must be acceptable to those who do not know the original relation. This is where the transition from a debt sign to an access sign becomes important. An access sign does not say: "Ivan owes Peter so much grain." It says something different: "this person or object has been recognised within this order of exchange." That recognition may initially remain personal or load-bound; it becomes monetary only when another holder can invoke it and expects a credible return path. Its force then derives not from memory of a particular debtor, but from recognition of the order in which the sign is accepted.

This distinction allows us to formulate the problem of monetary origins more precisely. The crucial threshold is not the existence of debt as such, but the point at which local debt is no longer sufficient and non-monetary signs of admission, account and recognition begin to be transferred among participants in a wider exchange.

5. Local Units of Account Before Money

The hypothesis must answer a prior question: if local debts precede money, how are they measured? The answer is that a unit of account need not begin as a circulating monetary object. It may begin as a socially recognised measure of equivalence inside a local order of obligation.

In a compact community, debts can be measured through customary units before money exists. A community may count grain in measures, livestock in heads, labour in days, land use in seasons, cloth in lengths, metal in weight, or obligations in conventional dues and fines. Such units are not yet money. They are standards of reckoning. They allow people to say that one household owes a quantity of grain, a day of ploughing, a measure of wool, a portion of processed flour, a bridewealth payment, a compensation payment, a rent, or a ritual due. The social unit of account therefore arises from repeated comparison inside institutions of production, redistribution, debt, tribute, compensation and processing.

Processing nodes make this clearer. A mill, press, forge, granary or storehouse creates recurring ratios: grain in and flour out, metal weight and tool output, wool and cloth, livestock and dairy products, stored goods and storage dues. These ratios can become customary measures. The local unit of account is not imposed from outside as an abstract numeraire. It grows out of repeated practical equivalences that must be remembered, recorded and enforced.

This point separates three things that are often conflated. First, a unit of account is a way of measuring obligations. Second, a debt sign records a particular obligation measured in that unit. Third, money is a transferable object, record or claim that can discharge obligations beyond the original relation. A village may have the first and second without the third. The access-sign hypothesis begins at the point where the third becomes necessary: local measurement remains intelligible, but local personal knowledge is no longer enough.

6. Four Stages

The proposed scheme has four stages. It is not a universal chronology and does not claim that all societies pass through the same path. It is an ideal-typical reconstruction: it shows a sequence of institutional thresholds through which we can understand how monetary function can emerge out of non-monetary practices. The stages are defined by observable changes in the scope of recognition: first, obligations remain within face-to-face or kin-based knowledge; second, a processing node concentrates recurring ratios and records; third, several settlements exchange within a local system where obligations remain reconstructible; fourth, an administered space brings together strangers and makes transferable recognition valuable. Its scope is therefore more limited than a general history of money. Mesopotamian accounting systems, Chinese ingot regimes, Mediterranean coinage, Andean redistribution, Mesoamerican cacao money and modern bank money do not all follow one path. The claim is that one recurrent route into monetary function passes through the transformation of local accounting and access signs at the boundary between known and unknown participants.

6.1. The Ordinary Community

The first stage is the ordinary community. Things are embedded in household, kinship, custom, status, use, reciprocity and obligation. Property in the modern sense of an alienable individual right is not yet the primary form of organisation. Craft may exist as skill, repair, the making of household utensils or seasonal work, but it is not yet durably separated from household production. There is no full trade inside the community because there is no social space of independent owners regularly exchanging alienable goods.

Debt and memory may exist. A person may remember that a neighbour helped with the harvest, that a clan received cattle, or that a family owes a return service. But such debt is not yet a monetary system. It is sustained by memory, proximity, custom and social sanction.

6.2. A New Type of Community Around a Processing Node

The second stage begins where processing becomes spatially concentrated around a fixed technical node: a mill, water wheel, windmill, press, forge or another device that separates processing from ordinary household production. The water mill is especially important in mountain conditions because it uses the natural fall of water and the flow of a river. The claim is not that the mill mechanically causes markets or money. It is more modest: such a node can concentrate movement, processing, storage, tools, repair, skills and authority around a fixed place.

This can produce a new type of community. Craft begins to separate from household production. Workshops can appear near the mill: places for processing wood, metal, wool, grain and other materials. The processing node creates a technical centre, and the technical centre can support social differentiation. This is not yet a market in the full sense, but it is a new density of functions: some produce grain, others process it, others repair, others transport, and others store.

A stylised image of such a system can be described as follows: a settlement lies on a mountain slope; a river runs in front of it; a mill works at the foot of the slope; vegetable gardens are on one side; orchards on the other; fields lie lower down; pastures lie higher up; and the first workshops appear near the mill and the road. This is not yet a town and not yet a market, but it is no longer a simple community. It is a local system with a technical centre.

6.3. The Compact Vertical Ecological System

The third stage emerges when several such settlements are linked into a single ecological system. This is especially important in mountainous regions, where vertical climatic zones differ sharply from one another. Within a short distance there may be valley agriculture, orchards, vegetable gardens, forest, pastures, animal husbandry, dairy products, wool, mills, workshops and routes for moving livestock.

At this point there is already regular movement of products among different settlements. A valley miller, a hillside orchard keeper, a highland herder and a craft worker near the mill produce different things. But this movement is not necessarily trade in the strict market sense. Distances are short, participants partly know one another, obligations are remembered and customary sanctions still work. Local debt, memory, tally, tablet, mark or account may therefore be sufficient.

Here it is important to distinguish exchange from money. There may be exchange of products among different communities within a single ecological system, but this does not yet require money. If all participants are sufficiently close, know the origin of the goods and can reconstruct the obligation, a local debt sign can work. It points to a concrete debtor and a concrete history of obligation.

6.4. Fair, Port, Crossroads or Town

The fourth stage begins when products leave this compact system: into the valley, onto the plain, towards a neighbouring mountain system, a pass, port, fair, crossroads or town. Here local debt signs cease to work. Participants no longer know one another well enough. They do not know whether the debt is valid, who the debtor is, what their reputation is, or whether they can be compelled to fulfil the obligation.

At this point an administered space of exchange appears. The fairground, city gate, port, ford, caravan station or trading yard does not belong to an abstract market, but to a concrete authority: a clan, temple, town, ruler, monastery, landholder or community. This authority need not intend to invent money. Its immediate tasks are simpler: to count visitors, allocate places, collect tolls, mark paid storage, record rights of passage, register traders, and distinguish a loaded merchant from an ordinary passer-by.

For these purposes, non-monetary signs are issued. Some are merchant-access signs: admissions, passes, safe-conducts and stall permissions. Others are goods-access signs: storage tallies, toll stamps, customs marks, assay marks and receipts for particular loads. At first, neither type is money; each records a specific administrative act. A personal pass remains non-monetary if only its original bearer can use it, and a goods mark remains non-monetary if it can only accompany the inspected load. Monetary function begins only where an issuer's recognition becomes transferable between traders and can be used again for entry, storage, toll settlement, recovery of goods, account or payment.

The mechanism is therefore a transfer of function. A sign created for access or account becomes transferable and acceptable beyond its original purpose.

7. Polanyi: The Market as an Instituted Process

For an evolutionary-institutional account of money, Polanyi provides a natural bridge. His concept of the "instituted process" allows us to see the market not as a natural arena of exchange, but as an organised space created by rules, places, power and social relations (Polanyi, 1944). Ports of trade, fairs, markets, trading yards and administrative centres are not neutral stages (Polanyi, 1963). They define who may participate, under what conditions, which goods may enter, which measures are recognised and which disputes can be resolved.

In this sense, money does not arise before the market and not simply inside the market. It arises together with the institutional shaping of the space of exchange. The access sign is a small material expression of this instituted process. It does not create the market by itself, but it makes participation in it visible and transferable.

Polanyi also helps avoid teleology. If the market is an instituted process, participants do not need to understand in advance that they are creating money. They may create an order of admission, tolls, storage, protection, measurement and dispute settlement. Monetary function appears as a by-product of the repetition of these practices.

8. Spontaneous Order and the Institutionalist Tradition

A second theoretical support for the argument is the tradition running from Adam Ferguson through Hayek and into modern institutional economics. Ferguson's classic formulation, that nations stumble upon institutions that are "the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design", captures the formal structure of the present hypothesis (Ferguson, 1995). Money, on this account, is not the execution of a design. It is an unintended result of actions directed towards other ends: paying a toll, marking storage, recording admission, certifying passage or administering access.

Hayek developed this insight into a general account of spontaneous order. Institutions emerge through cumulative use; they survive because they coordinate behaviour, not because they were designed for that purpose (Hayek, 1973). Hayek himself remained close to Menger on the substance of monetary theory. The method, however, can be separated from that substantive position. The access-sign hypothesis is Hayekian in its account of emergence, even where it departs from a purely commodity-centred explanation of money. It treats monetary function as a stabilised by-product of administrative and exchange practices, not as the conscious invention of an efficient medium of exchange.

The same methodological orientation is present in institutional economics. Veblen and Commons established that institutions, including monetary institutions, must be understood through habit, transaction and cumulative practice rather than through optimisation by isolated agents (Veblen, 1898; Commons, 1934). North's analysis traces how formal and informal rules accumulate, layer, displace and recombine over historical time (North, 1990). Greif's institutional analysis of medieval Mediterranean commerce shows how merchant communities developed reputation mechanisms, dispute settlement and shared recognition of signs and credentials that made exchange among strangers possible without a single unified state enforcement apparatus (Greif, 2006). Hodgson's evolutionary institutional economics insists that institutions persist because they coordinate and reproduce behaviour, not because they encode a prior design (Hodgson, 2004).

These contributions converge on a methodological claim that supports the access-sign hypothesis: institutional artefacts, including monetary function, are best understood as cumulative and partly emergent results of practice rather than as ex ante creations. The administrative sign that becomes money is a clear example. It begins as a record of a specific act, admission, toll payment, storage or passage, and acquires a general function only because other participants find it useful to accept. No design, project or theorem precedes its monetary career.

This tradition makes it possible to place the hypothesis within a serious analytical school without binding the argument to the substantive monetary theory of any single author. Ferguson's stumbling, Hayek's spontaneous order, Veblen's habit, Commons's transaction, North's institutional change, Greif's medieval commerce and Hodgson's evolutionary framework share one element: institutions can become what they were not designed to be. An access sign that becomes money is a particular case of this wider phenomenon.

9. Menger, Mises, and Chartalism: An Empirical Test

Menger and Mises explain an important commodity layer of money. Menger shows why more saleable goods can become media of exchange inside an already emerging space of exchange (Menger, 1892). Mises shows why monetary value cannot be an arbitrary declaration wholly detached from prior value or demand (Mises, 1953). Chartalist accounts, by contrast, locate the origin of money not in market selection but in a state's need for a unit of account to record and settle tax and tribute obligations; Rosenswig's (2025) comparative study of tally sticks in medieval England, imperial China, and the Classic Maya world shows independently invented state accounting devices converging on the same function across three unrelated civilizations, and argues that this convergence is inconsistent with a market-selection origin.

These accounts make different predictions that can be separated empirically rather than terminologically. If Menger and Mises are sufficient on their own, monetary standing should track a commodity's intrinsic saleability wherever that commodity travels: the same silver, wherever it crosses a border, should retain its exchange value in proportion to its material properties. If Rosenswig's chartalist account is sufficient on its own, a stamped or tallied object's monetary standing should track a single state's fiscal claim on the bearer, largely independent of the object's material composition, and should not depend on whether that state's certifying authority is unified or fragmented. The access-sign hypothesis predicts a third pattern: monetary standing should track the reach and credibility of a specific certifying authority, and should therefore vary with the degree to which certifying authority is unified under one issuer or fragmented among many competing, jurisdictionally bounded issuers, whether or not each issuer also levies a fiscal claim of its own.

Fragmentation matters here for a specific reason, not merely as a descriptive variable: where several issuers compete for the same pool of strangers, each has an incentive to make its own sign more easily verified, more consistently honoured and more portable than its rivals', since a stranger choosing among several available signs will gravitate toward the one whose backing is most credible and whose acceptance is least uncertain. A single unified issuer with no competitor faces no equivalent pressure; its sign is accepted by administrative fiat rather than by winning a comparison against alternatives. This does not predict that fragmentation always strengthens monetary signalling, since fragmentation without any mechanism for comparison or reputation could equally produce a chaos of mutually unrecognised local marks. It predicts a narrower thing: where fragmented issuers operate within a shared space in which strangers can compare, choose among, and carry credentials between them, as at a fair, port or crossroads, competitive pressure among issuers should push toward more verifiable, more portable signs than a single unchallenged issuer would need to produce.

Medieval European bracteates supply a documented setting in which these three predictions can be compared. A bracteate's silver content was often held deliberately below its face value, yet it circulated at face value inside the territory of the issuing authority; the same coin, carried across the border of a neighbouring lordship, lost this premium and reverted toward the value of its metal content alone. Periodic recoinage, Renovatio Monetae, demonetized the old stamp while reissuing coins of comparable silver content under a new stamp, and the new issue again circulated at a premium over its material value within the reissuing authority's territory. Neither pattern is well explained by commodity theory alone, since the material composition of the coin does not change at the border or across a recoinage.

The relation of this case to chartalism requires a precise distinction rather than a simple contrast. Renovatio Monetae is itself a form of monetary taxation, a seigniorage levy extracted through periodic recoinage (Svensson, 2013), so the bracteate case cannot be described simply as non-fiscal. What distinguishes it from Rosenswig's cases is not the absence of a fiscal dimension but the fragmentation of fiscal authority. During the first half-century of bracteate production, some 215 mints operated across the German-speaking lands: 106 ecclesiastical (61 episcopal, 45 monastic), 81 lay seigneurial, and only 28 under direct royal control (Svensson, 2013). Each of these authorities issued its own stamp, set its own recoinage schedule, and commanded circulation only within its own, often small, territory.

Rosenswig's cases involve a single state accounting apparatus administering tally sticks across an entire realm; the bracteate case involves over two hundred parallel, competing, jurisdictionally bounded certifying authorities, no one of which possesses general taxing power over the others' territory. The access-sign hypothesis locates monetary standing in the reach of a specific certifying authority without requiring that authority to be a unified fiscal state. It is therefore consistent with the jurisdictional fragmentation and premium-decay-at-the-border pattern this case displays. A chartalist account built around a single state's fiscal claim does not, on its own, explain why over two hundred distinct, non-unified authorities each generated the same local premium and the same cross-border collapse.

The same certification logic recurs in the non-fiscal settings examined below, including Chinese silver ingots requiring local assay marks independent of any tax obligation, and the Mongol tamga and paiza system of territorial access marks. The access-sign hypothesis is consistent with both the unified-fiscal cases chartalism explains well and the fragmented or non-fiscal cases it explains less directly.

This bears directly on Rosenswig's argument, and the relation is one of scope rather than contradiction. His tally-stick evidence is not in tension with the access-sign hypothesis; it is a documented instance of it, restricted to the case where certifying authority is fiscally unified at the level of an entire state. Read this way, his English, Chinese and Maya cases are not merely compatible with the present hypothesis in the abstract; they already function as a confirming instance of its prediction, since none of the three shows the jurisdictional-boundary and premium-decay pattern documented for the bracteate and Birmingham cases, consistent with certifying authority being unified rather than fragmented in each of his three settings. The present hypothesis differs from his chartalist account in a narrower but testable respect: it predicts that the same jurisdictional-boundary and premium-decay patterns should appear wherever certifying authority is fragmented among multiple, non-unified issuers, whether or not each issuer extracts a fiscal levy of its own, and that these patterns should be at their weakest where a single state fiscal apparatus dominates certification across an entire territory, as Rosenswig's own cases illustrate. Section 13 restates this as a directly falsifiable prediction for further cases beyond the ones already examined: a documented case of unified state certification producing the same boundary and premium patterns as the fragmented bracteate and Birmingham cases would count against the distinction drawn here.

A privately certified, non-state case makes the same point with unusual clarity because it occurred within living memory of documentary record rather than requiring archaeological reconstruction. Selgin's (2008) study of the Birmingham button-makers shows that when the Royal Mint failed to supply adequate small-denomination coin in late eighteenth-century Britain, private manufacturers issued copper tokens that circulated as money. They did so not because the Crown certified them, and not because copper itself commanded a stable saleability premium sufficient to explain their acceptance, but because a specific firm's mark was recognised and trusted across a growing radius extending well beyond the firm's own customers and workers.

Certifying authority here was fragmented among many competing private issuers rather than unified under any single state or firm. Token issuers with strong reputations saw their tokens circulate at a premium over intrinsic copper value and travel well beyond their place of issue, while tokens from less reputable issuers did not. This fits the jurisdictional-boundary and stamp-premium pattern identified above, observed in a case where fiscal authority played no direct role in certifying the tokens themselves.

Selgin's case does not show the creation of a wholly new unit of account: the tokens were denominated in the existing sterling system. Its relevance is different. It shows that once a unit of account is socially understood, non-state certified tokens may become acceptable settlement instruments when official small change is unavailable in adequate quantity.

10. Historical Mechanisms and Illustrations

The stylised mechanism can be presented as follows. Several mountain settlements, connected by mills, workshops and vertical climatic zones, regularly move products within a local system. As long as participants know one another, memory, debt and local records are sufficient. But then products leave this system: to a fair, a mountain pass, a port or a crossroads. The local sign must now operate under different conditions. It is no longer enough that the original parties remember the obligation. A third party must be able to recognise the sign, infer its institutional backing and expect that others will also accept it.

A fair authority does not set out to create money. It solves two distinct administrative problems: it regulates persons by counting traders, allocating places, granting passage and enforcing peace; and it regulates goods by marking storage, collecting dues, authorising scales, inspecting loads and recording obligations. The first set of signs consists of merchant-access signs, such as passes and safe-conducts; the second consists of goods-access signs, such as tallies, stamps, sealed documents, receipts and entries in accounts. Both become relevant to monetary history only at the stricter threshold described in Section 3: the sign must be transferable to a third party and must retain a repeat-use return path. Otherwise it remains either a personal credential or a mark tied to one load.

The Champagne fairs provide a denser case of this transition. They are not an origin point of money; by the high medieval period, coined money, credit instruments and merchant accounting already existed. Their relevance is that they show the infrastructure a sign requires to complete the transition: an organised space of admission, enforcement, measurement and settlement, within which a receipt, seal or bill could be used and recognised among strangers. Milgrom, North and Weingast treated the fairs as a setting in which institutions could sustain reputation and enforce honest behaviour among merchants who did not meet frequently; Edwards and Ogilvie later argued that public institutions played a more important role than private order in securing property rights (Milgrom et al., 1990; Edwards and Ogilvie, 2012). For the present article, this disagreement is useful rather than damaging: whether the decisive mechanism was merchant reputation, public courts or a mixture of both, the fairs were administered spaces with recognised places, rules, measures, courts, safe-conducts and practices of settlement, and Spufford's work confirms that the relevant signs became recognisable to persons who did not share a local memory of the original obligation (Spufford, 1988, 2002).

11. Tamga, Paiza and City Gates

The Eurasian system of tamga and paiza provides a non-European example of the same logic, developed here more briefly since it illustrates a pattern already established above. Allsen's work on Mongol Eurasia shows how movement, tribute, exchange and imperial administration were tied to material signs, credentials and controlled infrastructures (Allsen, 2001). The tamga, originally a clan or ownership mark, became associated in Mongol and post-Mongol space with customs duties and the certification of taxed goods. It is therefore best understood here as a goods-access sign: it linked a particular good or load to passage, authority and recognition, but did not itself become money. The paiza, or gerege, is the contrasting merchant-access sign: a personal credential granting safe passage, access to the postal relay infrastructure and exemption from local dues, recognised by an authority whose recognition was expected to be honoured across space (Rossabi, 2025).

The Altai and Semirechye material gives this comparison a more concrete regional foundation. Rogozhinsky and Cheremisin's classification of Turkic tamgas on petroglyphs and portable objects treats them as signs of group identity, privileged status, ruling lineages and political association across Southern Siberia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan; they also note dynastic tamgas in the Altai and tamgas associated with eighth- and ninth-century Karluk rulers on coins and petroglyphs (Rogozhinsky and Cheremisin, 2019). This evidence should not be turned into the claim that monetary function originated in the Altai. Its importance is more limited and more relevant to the present argument: in a mountain and steppe environment structured by routes, passes, herding, tribute and mobile authority, visible signs could connect property, status, movement and political recognition. The Old Turkic language of Tengri and qut adds a layer of legitimation to this world of signs, since khaganal authority was represented as grounded in heavenly favour or mandate (Roux, 1956; Kwiatkowski, 2009). For the access-sign hypothesis, this sacral-political background matters not as a monetary cause in itself, but as one way in which a mark could acquire public force before becoming, in other settings, a transferable monetary sign.

The comparison matters because it separates three functions later monetary arrangements can combine: certification of goods, authorisation of persons and access to an infrastructure. It also clarifies the limit specified in Section 3. Tamga and paiza clearly show material sign and institutional recognition, but neither normally completes the third transition into repeated acceptance as a means of settlement: the paiza is personal and status-bound, while the tamga remains attached to a particular good or fiscal inspection. This is not a weakness of the case; it is a useful negative control. It shows why neither a personal pass nor a customs mark should be retroactively called money. City gates supply the architectural analogue at the point of entry: the customs mark, the personal pass and the sign on metal make access visible and verifiable; only the last can become money when its recognition is transferable independently of a person or a load. The point is narrower than a claim of direct descent from gates, tamga or paiza: these forms show an institutional family of signs, only one branch of which can become monetary under conditions of transfer and repeated acceptance.

12. Control Cases and Alternative Trajectories

Chinese monetary history is important precisely because it does not confirm the necessity of coinage. From the Ming period onwards, silver in the form of ingots played an important role in large payments, while coinage was used for small transactions (von Glahn, 1996; Kuroda, 2020). Silver ingots varied in shape, weight and fineness; they required testing, weighing, assay practice and sometimes remelting.

This case does not refute the access-sign hypothesis. It refutes only the false thesis of the necessity of coinage. China shows that the problem of recognition can be solved not through a uniform coin form, but through assay certification. Monetary function is stabilised not necessarily in a struck disc, but in a system of practices that enables participants to recognise the quality, weight and acceptability of an object. Conversely, Sargent and Velde's account of small change shows why coinage could be an important solution to problems of denomination and everyday exchange without making coinage the necessary form of money as such (Sargent and Velde, 2002).

There are therefore different regimes for stabilising monetary function:

1. procedural certification, through courts, registers, reputation and sanctions;
2. material certification, through stamp, coin, seal or sign of authority;
3. assay certification, through testing, fineness, weighing and local experts.

Coinage is only one regime among others. In all cases, however, the general question remains: how does an object become acceptable among those who do not know its history personally?

Other cases mark the limits of the argument in different ways. Mesopotamian accounting systems show a trajectory in which silver, barley, temple-palace accounting and written records could organise payment and valuation without a simple passage through coinage. Andean vertical complementarity, as analysed by Murra and later revised by Van Buren, shows that ecological diversity and inter-zonal movement need not produce a monetary market if access to resources is organised through reciprocity, redistribution, kinship or direct control of ecological tiers (Murra, 1985; Van Buren, 1996). Kuroda's comparative history of money likewise shows that monetary practices can stabilise across multiple forms rather than through one European sequence (Kuroda, 2020). These cases do not falsify the present argument because the argument is not a universal sequence. They show that the access-sign route is one historically recurrent mechanism among several possible routes into monetary function.

13. Testable Implications and Further Research

The access-sign hypothesis is not a closed historical narrative. It generates implications that can be tested, refined or rejected by historians, archaeologists and economic anthropologists.

First, where monetary function emerges through access signs, one should expect evidence of administered exchange spaces before or alongside monetary stabilisation: gates, ports, fairs, storehouses, toll points, scales, courts, official measures, safe-conducts or procedures for registering obligations. This prediction fails if a documented case shows monetary function stabilising among strangers with no trace of such administered infrastructure preceding or accompanying it, since the hypothesis locates the source of trust in that infrastructure rather than treating trust as a spontaneous property of the object exchanged.

Second, the most important evidence would be a documented shift from named obligations to transferable claims, observable in the archival or archaeological record as a change from records naming a specific debtor and creditor to marks or tokens accepted independently of who currently holds them. The prediction fails if named, non-transferable debt records are found circulating among strangers who do not know the original parties, since the hypothesis holds that this specific transition, not debt or record-keeping as such, is what separates local account from monetary sign.

Third, failed or incomplete cases are as informative as successful ones, and should occur in a predictable pattern rather than randomly. Merchant-access signs, including paiza, status credentials and personal passes, should remain non-monetary where they are non-transferable, personal, sacred, status-bound or tied to a single act of admission. Goods-access signs, including customs marks, storage receipts and assay signs, should likewise remain non-monetary where they are inseparable from a particular inspected load, stored object or act of clearance. The prediction fails if personal, non-transferable credentials or load-bound goods marks are found circulating as money in the same way as impersonal signs. The barrier is not the absence of a stamp, but the absence of detachment and a repeat-use return path.

Fourth, and specific enough to fail on evidence already discussed, the three-theory test developed in Section 9 predicts that jurisdictional-boundary and stamp-premium-decay patterns should appear wherever certifying authority is fragmented among multiple, non-unified issuers, and should be weak or absent both where certification is genuinely decentralised and reputation-free, and where a single unified state fiscal apparatus dominates certification across an entire territory. Comparative numismatic and archival research on additional cases of private and quasi-public token issue, beyond the Birmingham and bracteate material examined here, would extend this test directly; a documented case of unified state certification producing the same fragmentation-linked pattern would count against the distinction drawn in Section 9.

Fifth, different societies stabilise the recognition problem through different regimes, procedural certification, material certification or assay certification, and the hypothesis predicts that the regime chosen tracks specific, identifiable conditions rather than varying arbitrarily: procedural certification where communities interact repeatedly and reputations can be tracked over time, material certification where transaction volume is high and parties are typically anonymous, assay certification where issuing authority is too fragmented for any single stamp to command wide trust. This prediction fails if the choice of regime shows no relation to these conditions across the comparative cases examined in Sections 10 through 12, or if a single regime dominates regardless of interaction frequency, anonymity, or the degree of jurisdictional fragmentation.

14. Conclusion

Money does not arise from a single cause. It is not only the most saleable commodity, only a debt record, only an order of the state, or only a metal coin. It arises at the intersection of commodity value, debt, accounting, authority, territory, access and social recognition.

The article has identified a boundary mechanism and assessed it against the two leading alternative accounts. First, a sign records access, toll payment, storage, passage, admission or account. Then, under the conditions of a fair, port, crossroads or town, it begins to be transferred among strangers. Repeated transfer creates circulation. Circulation creates an expectation of acceptance. The expectation of acceptance creates monetary function. Where certifying authority is unified under a single state fiscal apparatus, as in Rosenswig's tally-stick cases, the access-sign hypothesis and chartalism converge, and the boundary and premium patterns identified in Section 9 should be weak or absent; where certifying authority is fragmented among multiple, non-unified issuers, as in bracteate coinage and the Birmingham tokens, the access-sign hypothesis extends beyond what either commodity theory or chartalism explains on its own.

The four stages can be summarised briefly:

1. the ordinary community, where things are embedded in kinship, use and obligation, and money is absent;
2. the community organised around a processing node, where the mill or another technical centre supports craft and processing;
3. the vertical ecological system, where different settlements exchange products through debt, memory and local signs;
4. the fair, port, crossroads or town, where a sign can be detached from its original person or load, circulate among strangers and acquire monetary function through repeated acceptance.

This approach avoids two extremes. On the one hand, it does not derive money from mythical village barter. On the other hand, it does not reduce money to state command or conscious design. Money appears as the unintended result of practices of access, account and recognition. It can therefore take different historical forms, coin, ingot, receipt, record or assay-certified object, but only where the underlying recognition can be invoked again by another holder rather than remaining tied to its original person, load or act.

Recent digital tokens show that the problem of turning a non-monetary sign into monetary function is not confined to early coinage; however, a substantive analysis of such cases lies beyond the scope of the present article.

References

Allsen, T. T. 2001. Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bell, S. A. 2001. "The Role of the State and the Hierarchy of Money." Cambridge Journal of Economics 25(2): 149-163.

Chick, V. 1992. On Money, Method and Keynes: Selected Essays. London: Macmillan.

Commons, J. R. 1934. Institutional Economics: Its Place in Political Economy. New York: Macmillan.

Culham, J. 2023. "Exchange Liquidity and Redemption Liquidity." Cambridge Journal of Economics 47(3): 667-679.

Desan, C. 2014. Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dow, S. 2017. "Central Banking in the Twenty-First Century." Cambridge Journal of Economics 41(6): 1539-1557.

Edwards, J. and Ogilvie, S. 2012. "What Lessons for Economic Development Can We Draw from the Champagne Fairs?" Explorations in Economic History 49(2): 131-148.

Ferguson, A. [1767] 1995. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Edited by F. Oz-Salzberger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fontana, G. 2004. "Hicks on Monetary Theory and History: Money as Endogenous Money." Cambridge Journal of Economics 28(1): 73-88.

Graeber, D. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.

Graeber, D. and Wengrow, D. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Allen Lane.

Greif, A. 2006. Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hayek, F. A. 1973. Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume I: Rules and Order. London: Routledge.

Hodgson, G. M. 2004. The Evolution of Institutional Economics. London: Routledge.

Ingham, G. 2004. The Nature of Money. Cambridge: Polity.

Innes, A. M. 1913. "What Is Money?" Banking Law Journal 30(5): 377-408.

Knapp, G. F. [1905] 1924. The State Theory of Money. London: Macmillan.

Kuroda, A. 2020. A Global History of Money. London: Routledge.

Kwiatkowski, P. 2009. "The Noun 'Tengri' in the Old Turkic Inscriptions." Przegląd Orientalistyczny 3-4(230-231): 151-160.

Lavoie, M. 1999. "The Credit-Led Supply of Deposits and the Demand for Money: Kaldor's Reflux Mechanism as Previously Endorsed by Joan Robinson." Cambridge Journal of Economics 23(1): 103-113.

Lawson, T. 2016. "Social Positioning and the Nature of Money." Cambridge Journal of Economics 40(4): 961-996.

Lawson, T. 2018. "The Constitution and Nature of Money." Cambridge Journal of Economics 42(3): 851-873.

Menger, C. 1892. "On the Origin of Money." Economic Journal 2(6): 239-255.

Milgrom, P. R., North, D. C. and Weingast, B. R. 1990. "The Role of Institutions in the Revival of Trade: The Law Merchant, Private Judges, and the Champagne Fairs." Economics & Politics 2(1): 1-23.

Mises, L. von. [1912] 1953. The Theory of Money and Credit. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Morgan, J. 2023. "Systemic Stablecoin and the Brave New World of Digital Money." Cambridge Journal of Economics 47(1): 215-260.

Mortágua, M. 2026. "Can Crypto-Assets Be Money? A Discussion on the Nature of Money." Cambridge Journal of Economics 50(1): 45-70.

Nersisyan, Y. and Wray, L. R. 2016. Modern Money Theory. New York: Palgrave.

North, D. C. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Peacock, M. S. 2017. "How Do You Know That's Money? An Alternative to the Regression Theorem." Journal of Institutional Economics 13(2): 261-285.

Polanyi, K. 1944. The Great Transformation. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.

Polanyi, K. 1963. "Ports of Trade in Early Societies." Journal of Economic History 23(1): 30-45.

Rector, C. and Allen, D. W. E. 2023. "Cryptoeconomics." Journal of Institutional Economics 19(5): 621-635.

Rogozhinsky, A. and Cheremisin, D. 2019. "Turkic Tamgas of Southern Siberia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan." Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia 47(2): 121-131.

Rosenswig, R. M. 2025. "Tally Sticks and the Convergent Origins of State Accounting." (Comparative study of England, China and the Classic Maya.)

Rossabi, M. 2025. "The Paiza System in the Mongol Empire." (Historical study of Mongol passage credentials.)

Roux, J.-P. 1956. "Tängri: Essai sur le ciel-dieu des peuples altaïques." Revue de l'Histoire des Religions 149(1): 49-82.

Sargent, T. J. and Velde, F. R. 2002. The Big Problem of Small Change. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Schmandt-Besserat, D. 1992. Before Writing, Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Schumpeter, J. A. 1983. The Theory of Economic Development. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Searle, J. R. 2017. "Money: Ontology and Deception." Cambridge Journal of Economics 41(5): 1453-1470.

Selgin, G. 2008. Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Spufford, P. 1988. Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Spufford, P. 2002. Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe. London: Thames & Hudson.

Svensson, R. 2013. "Renovatio Monetae: Bracteates and Coinage Policies in Medieval Europe." London: Pickering & Chatto.

Tymoigne, E. 2016. "Government Monetary and Fiscal Operations: Generalising the Endogenous Money Approach." Cambridge Journal of Economics 40(5): 1317-1332.

Van Buren, M. 1996. "Rethinking the Vertical Archipelago: Ethnicity, Exchange, and History in the South Central Andes." American Anthropologist 98(2): 338-351.

Veblen, T. 1898. "Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 12(4): 373-397.

von Glahn, R. 1996. Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Declaration of Generative AI Use

OpenAI Codex was used during the preparation of this manuscript for English-language editing, structural suggestions, consistency checks and assistance in identifying bibliographic items for independent verification. It did not determine the research question, theoretical claims, interpretation of evidence or conclusions. The author independently reviewed the sources and retains responsibility for the argument, wording, citations, factual accuracy and final text.