This book is a discovery. The author is virtually unknown today among anthropologists in Germany and elsewhere, but he was held in considerable esteem around 1900. An Outline of the Origins of Money attempts to reconstruct the history of money by comparing all the evidence that could be gathered about the primitive forms of money among Indigenous peoples. This means that written sources from antiquity or China play only a subordinate role. Schurtz believed—and this was quite in the spirit of the German historical school—that he could find the logic of the evolution of money inductively. So, he would compare a large number of observations and structure them according to a smaller number of plausible insights. He distinguished between inside money and outside money, but these terms did not have the same meaning as in modern economics. Inside money was a phenomenon of the community; outside money was commercial. Inside money arose primarily out of the creation of useful and—what was more important—symbolic objects, which lent prestige to their creator and would then pass from hand to hand via gift giving. Outside money would develop out of inside money with trade, but this happened not only slowly; it was actively impeded in many cases, in that customs and taboos developed that prevented such expansion. Indigenous peoples are typically not export-oriented but inward-looking.

The rich material contained in the exposition well deserves to be republished today after more than 100 years, although our modern notions of the origins of money are somewhat different, and the theory of anthropology has developed considerably, especially regarding the theory of gift giving. The book was first published in German at Weimar, in 1898, divided into eighteen chapters (Schurtz Reference Schurtz1898). The first three and the last three chapters provide a historically oriented theory of primitive money in its different forms, from ornaments used for exchange to cowrie strings and coins; the chapters in-between provide manifold evidence for the different types. The translators, Enrique Martino and Mario Schmidt, are therefore aware that the modern reader will be grateful for careful annotations that explain the relationship between the concepts used in this book and modern teaching. They have done a very good job by pursuing a middle way between introducing the technical terms of modern anthropology and economics in the translation and preserving old expressions in order to retain the spirit of the book and the time of its origin. They explain the fundamentals of the book in an Introduction, situating it in the context of the discussions about anthropology in the late nineteenth century, and in Germany in particular. They also relate it to the German historical school in economics. There is, moreover, a Foreword by Michael Hudson that explains the current conceptualizations of money in modern anthropology. Two bibliographies have been added. One is a reconstruction of the many ethnographic publications and travel reports used by Schurtz; the other is for the Introduction and the annotations of the translators in their function as editors. One cannot do more to present an old book that could be regarded as a classic in its field, in a foreign language. By contrast, only a reprint of the original edition in mediocre quality is available in German today (Schurtz Reference Schurtz1898).

The translators point out in their Introduction that the Outline appeared during the Methodenstreit , the controversy between Gustav von Schmoller and Carl Menger. Schurtz tried to stay out of it, but he is clearly much closer to Schmoller with his trust that a mass of material provides more evidence than even well-chosen isolated examples and deductive reasoning from abstract principles. What is more important for the problem at hand: Schurtz rejects Menger’s idea that the origin of money could be explained by postulating a society with extended barter and relative prices or roughly given exchange rates that then invents money as a means to facilitate trade.

Schurtz was born in 1863, studied mineralogy and chemistry, then turned to experimental psychology, but his Habilitation was about clothing and ornaments in the field of ethnology. After he had done some lecturing, he was employed to reorganize the anthropological museum of the city of Bremen, today the Übersee-Museum, with rich collections assembled in the colonial period. His focus on material objects is motivated by his admiration of the artistic creation of Indigenous peoples. While simple communities have many possessions in common, the pride of having made something beautiful leads to the claim to individual property; the object can become a gift, provide prestige, and begin to circulate in a process of gift giving along the lines of the social structure defined by custom. The recognition of this origin of money is coupled with the recognition of art among Indigenous peoples, which would become influential in the early twentieth century. To explain the origin of money in this manner, by connecting the social and economic phenomenon with a vision of culture, fit in well with the ideas of the late historical school. Martino and Schmidt mention Max Weber, Marcel Mauss, Karl Helfferich, and Franz Oppenheimer as contemporaries influenced by Schurtz and propose comparisons with more modern authors like Marshall Sahlins, Maurice Godelier, and Chris Gregory.

Schurtz’s theory was historical and visual, not analytical economic theory. In particular, he provides no overarching abstract theory of inside and outside money. Gift exchange and commerce hang together, but they are also opposites. They are realized in different institutions; they may exist simultaneously, but when one is dominant, the other usually is not. We read in the Introduction (p. 21; note that I add the authors to whom an allusion is or seems to be made in brackets):

Schurtz might have reduced the tension between the different uses he makes of the term money, applying it to all sorts of things from stones to coins and in quite different circumstances from tribes to the modern world economy, if he had taken time to introduce a more differentiated terminology. He treats objects as “money,” which we would never count as such. But then the book might never have come out and we should be bereft of a fabulous collection of monies and institutions from five continents, which, in Schurtz’s times, exhibited an incredible variety of forms and thus challenges the modern reader.

After his own Introduction, he begins with very simple societies, where much is common property, but certain objects like ornaments and weapons are personal and bequeathed to daughters or sons. They can become indicators of wealth; they may lead to hoarding; and one may begin to pay with inside money for services, in order to be freed from corporal punishment or to obtain a favor from a leader. Numerous examples are given. Inside money like mats is less liquid than outside money like coins; their import may lead to a drain of inside money.

Sign monies like the modern notes had many more antecedents than one usually knows. The problem is not to invent sign money like leather tokens in lieu of coins but to generate trust in them and to keep them circulating. (I recall an example from Greek antiquity, where iron coins substituted silver coins for a limited period; the proprietors, who had advanced the silver against iron, were repaid in silver eventually; see Schefold Reference Schefold2016.) Of course, Schurtz mentions Marco Polo and the notes issued by the Mongol emperors of China, but sign money does not necessarily consist of paper. Strips of cotton cloth or mats and much else can assume this function, and paper notes can continue to circulate for a while after the government issuing them has disappeared.

Schurtz then goes on to consider types of money distinguished partly according to their social function, like sacred money, and partly according to the material used, like shell money. Hence, the same money employed by a community may fit into several categories. The term sacred money is broadly applied, when myths surround the origin of the objects, when old Venetian gold coins featuring depictions of Mark the Evangelist become amulets in Muslim Mecca, or when ancient Greek temples assume the role of banks. (For a history of thought on sacred money primarily focused on ancient Greece—therefore a complement to Schurtz—see Brandl Reference Brandl2015). It pleases Schurtz to emphasize the exotic character of his examples, but he endeavors to prove that they can always be understood as logical expressions of the context in which these monies operate. For instance, the accumulation of inside money leads to inequality; more egalitarian societies have practices to reduce it, like the custom to collectively consume the wealth of the rich when they die.

Eventually, economic laws make themselves felt. If the circulation of cowries is full, prices in terms of cowries tend to be low. If the access to cowries becomes more difficult, prices rise. You would not think of seigniorage in the context of shell money, but cowries circulate in two forms, in pieces and mounted on strings, and the fabrication of cowrie strings can be compared to minting. “In Dahomey … cowries generally circulate unstrung, with only the king making payments using cowrie strings prepared by his wives; a single string is supposed to contain 2000 cowries, but in reality, it contains only 1500” (p. 110). Coins made of the precious metals (gold, silver, even copper) are, in this book, a bridge between ornament money and metal money. They are not sign money because of their intrinsic value. They arise from ornament and they often return to being ornament, when they reach more primitive regions. I may refer to the great astronomer Copernicus, who wrote in 1517 that silver coins would be melted down and used as ornament as soon as the silver contained in the coin was worth more than what one could buy with the coin (Sommerfeld Reference Sommerfeld1978). The quantity of money then is endogenously determined.

Schurtz also discusses monetary systems. Different monies circulated in different spheres and were combined additively. Among natives of the Missouri region: Two knives equal one pair of leggings, two knives and one pair of leggings equal one blanket, two knives and one pair of leggings and one blanket equal one rifle, etc. (p. 158). Inside money develops. Commodities are transactable ( beweglich , as Schurtz says) but only up to a limit: Transactability ends when they are consumed. Money, by contrast, is infinitely transactable. Schurtz thus concludes, as the translators observe, with a concept for money that is close to the modern term: liquidity.