The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

by Peter Zeihan

The circa 2000 BCE solution was the shekel. Three one-hundredths of a shekel could be traded for one quart of barley. One shekel was equal to 11 grains of silver. Over time the shekel became synonymous with our modern concept of money. One shekel could pay a laborer for a month. Twenty shekels bought you a slave. By 1700 BCE and courtesy of Hammurabi, if someone injured you, you had the option of choosing restitution in the form of shekels rather than eyeballs. Bam! Finance was born! Armed with a commonly agreed-upon medium of exchange, labor specialization took a leap forward. There was now far less risk for a once-farmer to evolve into an anything-else. Income from anything-else could be swapped for barley at a known rate. After all, the shekel was literally redeemable for food. So handy was the breakthrough, use of the shekel spread far and wide. Good data from a hundred human lifetimes in the past can be hard to come by, but so central—literally and figuratively—were all things Mesopotamian that even the Egyptians and the people of the Indus Valley Civilization adopted the Mesopotamian shekel standard on those rare occasions when they engaged in transregional trade. It . . . took a while before things stuck. Not just currency. Civilization, too.