2026/05/07 by Ellen M. Nye · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Historical Economic and Legal Thought #Historical Economic and Social Studies #Latin American history and culture
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0010417526100498
openalex publication_date 2026/05/07 · openalex created_date 2026/05/08 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract Flows of Spanish American silver have long been bound up in narratives of early modernity, the growth of globalization, and the coming of capitalism. This article reconsiders these narratives through a trial held in seventeenth-century Ottoman Istanbul of imported lion dollar coins that were suspected of being false. The trial shows the different ways groups—both within and outside the state and transacting on different scales from local to interstate—sought to impose criteria of evaluation on coins as they crossed oceans and empires in an era of incomplete state power and growing interstate trade. The trial worked to align competing understandings of money and restored confidence through a performance of measurement. In reckoning with competing understandings of money before multiple monetary authorities, social relations, as much as the physical coins, were on trial. By moving past a traditional divide between thinking globally about money as a trade commodity and thinking comparatively about money as a creature of the state in distinct polities, the trial of the lion dollars shows how early modern money was made and remade through a process of global circulation and far-reaching interactions with competing authorities.