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Inequality is, fundamentally, control over other peoples’ labour. It is much easier to control someone else’s labour if you can monopolise the means of measuring it. This is why, in 1972’s Stone Age Economics, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argued that it was the “instrumentalisation” of exchange that separated economies based on reciprocity from those based on trade. Or, in the neo-evolutionary typologies, quantification of exchange separated egalitarian economies from inegalitarian ones. It is ironic that at the same time as Sahlins argued that quantification created inequalities, “monetarist” economists argued that their governments should only use money to quantify an economy’s supply. Their proposal was a dramatic break from Keynes’ suggestion that sufficient money should be produced to quantify an economy’s demand. A half century on, with inflation raging and inequality spiking, it is clear that the macro-effects of economic quantification remain only half-grasped (or conveniently forgotten). In the space between anthropology and economics we find a centuries-old debate about the source of money’s value—is it the mass of material it represents, as believed by advocates of the gold standard? Or is it something else money quantifies? Is money a neutral entity or politically loaded? How far into the past does monetary behaviour go? Here, archaeology has an important role to play. The half century that has passed since Sahlins first published his typology has been marked by a substantial increase in archaeological data about how past human economies measured their material worlds. In discussing the origins of money and measurement, we theorise how different regimes of quantification have increased (and decreased) inequality over the millennia.

EAA 2023: Abstract

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