It Appears That There Never Was a Barter Society

One of the historical tropes that we we are taught is that money developed after barter societies became unmanagable.

It turns out that there there is no evidence that suggests that a barter society ever existed:

In the beginning, there was barter. Then, and forever after, there was money

That’s the myth every student of economics learns, that money grows out of barter. The idea is that monetary exchange solves the problem of the double coincidence of wants—that a person who is interested in trading needs to find someone who wants what they have and has what they want. Money makes trade much easier, so the story goes, and thus becomes a remarkable example of both human ingenuity and economic progress. The fact is, as Ilana E. Strauss [ht: ja] explains, the story is false. Human beings did not invent money to solve the difficulties of barter exchange. Barter turns out to be a historical myth.

various anthropologists have pointed out that this barter economy has never been witnessed as researchers have traveled to undeveloped parts of the globe. “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,” wrote the Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey in a 1985 paper. “All available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”

Humphrey isn’t alone. Other academics, including the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, and the Cambridge political economist Geoffrey Ingham have long espoused similar arguments.

When barter has appeared, it wasn’t as part of a purely barter economy, and money didn’t emerge from it—rather, it emerged from money. After Rome fell, for instance, Europeans used barter as a substitute for the Roman currency people had gotten used to. “In most of the cases we know about, [barter] takes place between people who are familiar with the use of money, but for one reason or another, don’t have a lot of it around,” explains David Graeber, an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics.

………

And there are many other examples in the historical and anthropological record of forms of exchange that precluded money—centralization and redistribution, gifts, potlatch, trade at the edges of and between non-monetary societies, and so on. But there was no original barter economy, which was then surpassed by the use of money.And there are many other examples in the historical and anthropological record of forms of exchange that precluded money—centralization and redistribution, gifts, potlatch, trade at the edges of and between non-monetary societies, and so on. But there was no original barter economy, which was then surpassed by the use of money.

………

Instead, what mainstream economics offers starting with Smith, and continues to offer studies today, is a story about the mythical—not real, historical—origins of capitalism.

It does put the entire academic endeavor of economics in a different light.