The economic effect of these conflicts was to integrate an ever larger proportion of the world’s population into national and even global markets, and monetary systems. Many scholars have written about the effect of European contact on primitive monetary systems that Europeans called “pseudo-money.” French historian Fernand Braudel observes, “The fate of this pseudo-money after the European impact (whether cowries in Bengal, wampum after 1670 or the Congo zimbos) proves identical in every case where it can be investigated— monstrous and catastrophic inflation, caused by an increase in
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