Money has always been a story people agreed on.
BEFORE COINS
First we traded what we had.
A goat for grain. It worked until you wanted something the other person didn’t need.
COWRIES
Then, shells.
Small, hard to fake, easy to carry. Cowries from the Maldives paid for things in Bengal for centuries.
AROUND 600 BCE
Metal got a stamp.
Silver in the Indian janapadas, electrum in Lydia. Trust moved from the object to whoever marked it.
11TH CENTURY, CHINA
Paper started as a receipt.
Song dynasty merchants were tired of hauling iron coins, so they wrote promises instead.
1540s
Sher Shah Suri struck the rupiya.
The name has lasted almost five hundred years.
1935
A central bank took over the promise.
The Reserve Bank of India opened, and the rupee became something an institution vouched for.
1950
A cardboard card let you eat now and pay later.
Money became a habit you carried in your wallet.
2016
A phone number became a bank account.
India started paying for chai by scanning a square.
NOW
Every chapter made money easier to move.
None of them made it easier to understand your own.
That’s the next chapter.
The Corpus is a small circle of people who’d rather understand their money than just move it.
Rooms, conversations, and people worth knowing. Entry is by waitlist.
Put down your email here. Welcome to the Corpus.
You’re in line. We’ll write to you soon.