Money’s micro and macro qualities: Slaves,colonies,regions,and markets in the historical Caribbean – and beyond

Abstract

This article reconsiders Sidney W Mintz’s classic 1964 chapter ‘Currency problems in eighteenth century Jamaica and Gresham’s Law' in light of the forms and uses of money in the colonial Caribbean slave economies and the utility of Mintz’s approach to understand today’s globalizing multicurrency economy. In considering Gresham’s Law that ‘bad money drives out good', Mintz showed how, in colonial Jamaica, money’s four functions – medium of exchange, means of payment, unit of account, and store of value – were transformed by the enslaved themselves as they worked with and in currencies circulating locally and via colonial financial networks. Further, Mintz’s ethnographic work suggests an approach to the financial practices of the poor and marginalized that highlights how their uses of money, paralleled in other arenas of their lives, confront and complicate dominating political–economic power. Directions provided by Mintz’s insights are used to analyze creative uses of money in the present world economic order.