In this letter, the second part of my critique of the “stakeholder myth” forwarded by Christine Desan and other chartalist writers as a replacement for the “myth of barter,” we are headed directly into the weeds of a rather tricky issue, and one which has not, to the best of my knowledge, yet been solved by historians: the monetary history of the Carolingian Empire, and the reforms of Pepin and Charlemagne more specifically. Again, what follows here is my current hypothesis and best effort to reconstruct the system, rather than a definitive solution. I suspect that I have solved it, but solutions are known to vanish in the face of inconvenient facts (Indeed — that is the whole point of this blog). I also do not, here, provide a full scholarly apparatus to demonstrate the truth of my conclusions and the steps of my reasoning: that will have to wait for future work in a more formal venue. It is worth pointing out that my conclusions here rely on well over two hundred years of painstaking work of scholars who have collected, catalogued, and speculated about the coins: if I am lucky enough to have finally “figured it out,” this was only because generations before me did the legwork. Here, however, I want to acknowledge that I have relied especially on data and speculations provided by Peter Spufford and Harry Miskimin, although I depart in places from their interpretations.
The Myth of the Stakeholder: Part 2
The Myth of the Stakeholder: Part 2
The Myth of the Stakeholder: Part 2
In this letter, the second part of my critique of the “stakeholder myth” forwarded by Christine Desan and other chartalist writers as a replacement for the “myth of barter,” we are headed directly into the weeds of a rather tricky issue, and one which has not, to the best of my knowledge, yet been solved by historians: the monetary history of the Carolingian Empire, and the reforms of Pepin and Charlemagne more specifically. Again, what follows here is my current hypothesis and best effort to reconstruct the system, rather than a definitive solution. I suspect that I have solved it, but solutions are known to vanish in the face of inconvenient facts (Indeed — that is the whole point of this blog). I also do not, here, provide a full scholarly apparatus to demonstrate the truth of my conclusions and the steps of my reasoning: that will have to wait for future work in a more formal venue. It is worth pointing out that my conclusions here rely on well over two hundred years of painstaking work of scholars who have collected, catalogued, and speculated about the coins: if I am lucky enough to have finally “figured it out,” this was only because generations before me did the legwork. Here, however, I want to acknowledge that I have relied especially on data and speculations provided by Peter Spufford and Harry Miskimin, although I depart in places from their interpretations.