FactGrid:Coins and Currencies

US political campaigning against bimetalism, i.e. politics on a currency that binds the gold to the silver value. Silver is flowing into the eastern economies due to political decisions of the Democratic party

A brief historical introduction

Calculating with historical sums of money is at first sight a thing for specialists, numismatists. The currencies are obsolete and usually not even organised in decimal systems.

Some things were easier though: Today's currencies are fluctuating in a constant fixing performed on the market that is trading with foreign currencies.

Early modern currencies were metal based, that is the monetary value was basically in the coin: an amount of silver, gold, or copper people which would carry around. The coins would wear off over time, that was basically the constant loss of value everyone had to take into account.

Sums of money would, therefore, be usually given in a book currency independent of all the actual coins: The Reichsthaler, the Pound Sterling etc. had stable fixed silver or gold values while an existing coinage would make that sum at any given moment, more or less accurately. Traders would know the fixed ratio between two currencies like "9 Pound sterling is 40 Reichstaler between the 1690s and 1750)". Bills of exchange would make it unnecessary to carry larger sums of money from one spot to the next. Contact a Merchants with connections to a city you want to visit; give him money you want to spend in this city and he will give you a bill of exchange on which his business partner will give you that very sum in local currency. (The merchants use the arising deficits in their own internal trading.)

The system was complex with the constants degradation of circulating coinage against the backdrop of the stable book currencies and with the flow of the metals gold, silver and (less problematic) copper that needed an internal balance in an currency that used the three metals. As soon as another nation had a different notion of that balance the market would create a flow of the respective metal into the part of the world that had a higher esteem for the respective metal.

Calculate with historical moneys

Calculations with the established exchange rates are relatively safe and stable between 1650 and 1750. The The Marteau Early 18th-Century Currency Converter offers a tool set.

You can otherwise gain independence with a calculation that converts the sum into silver equivalents. This is relatively safe up to the year 1871 when Germany introduces the Gold standard. Up to that point individual nations could move from gold to silver standards and back and still stay in a corridor of a global notion of rough equivalents between gold and silver. After the 1860s, however, silver is loosing rapidly against gold, jumping from a ratio of once 1:14 to 1:100. (These fluctuations are not over yet, we are still witnessing a good deal of speculation on this market today especially with anticipations of the rise and fall of gold on the present silver market.)

Use SPARQL to convert sums into silver equivalents

FactGrid coins and FactGrid items for the stable book currencies come with silver and gold equivalents, so that you can use a conversion into the silver equivalent to compare statements of values between currencies and over longer periods of time.

The following search gives the SPARQL-code for a conversion - here of German 19th-century Reichstaler:

• get the silver-equivalent for a computation in Reichsthaler of the 1850s