A Platform of Research in Economic History
From Marteau
Revision as of 22:03, 3 March 2006
The Marteau Early 18th Century Currency Converter is first of all a website designed to help you if you have to calculate in 17th and 18th century moneys. Our conversion tools handle the most frequent non decimal systems and calculate with early 18th century market values of different national and regional moneys. Read the more detailed introduction for further insight into the problems of 17th and 18th century monetary exchange.
The page we designed around the conversion tools offers you information on the individual currencies, it offers you a monetary dictionary and it gives you information on prices and wages in different early 18th century moneys.
Our platform should in any case give you first ideas of how money mattered in the 17th and 18th centuries. One had to think of an intrinsic value of coins, one was transferred with bills of exchange and had to consider ever changing exchange rates between trading places. Money created a wide flow silver gold and copper balanced by a variety of factors such as international trade balances, national gold/silver ratios, the value of the coinage circulating and the readiness of individual countries to protect their money (or to make money of their coinage by gradually devaluating the circulating coinage). Europeans realised that they were selling silver for gold on the world wide market, they coined money at the coasts of India, they realised that there was a flow of moneys on the European market. Globalisation is not a 20th century invention – it is a something Masters of the Mint such as Isaac Newton in London would consider when asked for their judgment on monetary questions. We are therefore eager to offer editions of 17th and early 18th century texts dealing with monetary questions.
As you will realise we have started to wikify the whole project area mostly to invite colleagues to add information on prices and wages, coins and currencies – and to correct mistakes wherever we have made them. Contact us to get a your personal writing permission, we are quite happy if those who use the database help us to improve it.
