This panel takes a global perspective on the history of money during the early modern period, an era often associated with the growth of state power, colonialism, and global commercial connections. By facilitating comparisons and drawing connections across different historiographies, we hope to elucidate the relationship between money and sovereignty, the links between social relations and market exchange, and the tensions between global currencies and localized values.

Joshua Batts will explore exchanges in mining expertise between Japan and Spain, the two largest silver producers in the early seventeenth-century world. Ellen Nye will discuss the social and political dimensions of reforms that transformed the Ottoman monetary system from one dominated by a variegated supply of foreign currencies to one grounded by new Ottoman coins. Andrew Edwards will ask what changes in money can tell us about the Market Revolution that followed the American Revolutions. Finally, Shweta Banerjee focuses on the minting reforms imposed by the East India Company-State, and the relationship between the colonial state and sarrafs (bankers) to unpack the monetary world of South Asia in the early nineteenth century.