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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 13 Apr 2022

Taken: 13 Apr 2022

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The History of Money •
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Jack Weatherford •

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Properlty of Southern Americas

Properlty of Southern Americas
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Outsiders have attempted to estimate how much wealth the Spaniards and Portuguese took out the Americas. The colonial powers, of course, went to great effort to keep the amounts secret, causing much scholastic effort to have been spent gathering and ev aluating records from around the world. Researchers have measured the amount of ore mined and the amount of metal extracted. They have compared it with the food and provisions for the miners and with the amount of mercury used in the treatment of ore. They have compared the shipping records with arrival records in Europe and, most importantly, with the records of the Casa de la Contratacion, the bureau in charge of Spanish shipping. Scholars have dug through records, some of which were falsified, and have tried to determine how much gold and silver was pilfered or shipped illegally.

Based on all of these methods, a range of estimates has emerged. Historians calculated that from the European discovery until 1800, between 145,000 and 165,000 tons of silver were shipped out in addition to 2,739 to 2846 tons of gold. At the price of $400 per ounce, the total gold production would have a value of approximately $36 billion. Even these numbers, however, cannot convey the significance of such an amount of gold and silver. In an age without paper money, the introduction of this much specie into the monetary system had an effect that would be difficult for us to imagine. ~ Page 100

. . . the gold sitting in Fort Knox today may have been mined hundreds or even thousands of years ago. It could have been made into many objects and melted many times through the years. Some of it may date back to the ancient gold mines of Nubia in Africa and Lydia in Asia Minor. Almost assuredly some of it came from the booty seized from the Aztecs of Mexico by Herman Cotes and from the Incas of Peru by Francisco Pizarro. Some of the gold may once have been Byzantine coins or part of headdress from the ancient empire of Ghana. Some was panned from the Yukon in the nineteenth century by Irish and Scottish prospectors, and some lifted from the deep mines of South Africa by Zulu and Xhosa tribesmen. The whole history of gold on earth now rests in these chambers. ~ Page 179
2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Excerpt

The History of Money
2 years ago.

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