银行英语,银行的发展历史

Unit One Introduction

Section One: The Introduction of currency

Passage One: The Origin of Currency

In ancient history coins circulated as money long before paper money was used. The earliest coins are believed to have originated independently in both China and the ancient kingdom of Lydia in the 7th century BC. In about 500 BC, The famous Persian King, Darius, revolutionized the economy of his empire by using coins as a substitute for barter. Evidence of this change has been found in the well-preserved inscriptions and rock carvings in Persepolis in Iran.

Paper money appeared in China in the 8th century. It is well-known that printing with movable blocks was invented in China approximately 50 BC, and paper was firsts manufactured there in about 100 AD, both necessary to the manufacture of paper currency. The earliest paper money consisted of receipts that were issued either for valuables deposited at special shops for safekeeping or for taxes paid-in kind and held on deposit in a provincial center rather than being shipped to the capital. Visitors to China during the 12th and 13th centuries were impressed by the use of paper money. Marco Polo regarded ―the coinage of this paper money‖ as a novel way of doing what the alchemists had tried. In the 13th century the government of Genghis Khan exchanged its paper notes for gold, and counterfeiting paper money was a capital offense. Although governmental units in China had given up the issuance of paper money by the year 1500 because of difficulties with oversupply and inflation, private banks continued to issue it.

In Europe during the Middle Ages there were important developments in banking and credit in the large trading centers of Florence, Venice, Genoa, Constantinople and Bruges. However, these centers did not use paper money, even though banks transferred funds with letters of exchange and extended credit in the form of delayed payments. It is believed that paper currency was first used in Europe in the 7th century, at about the same time that the first commercial banks were established in Sweden and Great Britain.

Paper money was used quite early by settlers in North and South America. In 1685 there was a critical shortage of coins in Canada, and the French colonists used playing cards carrying official seals and signatures as money. In the 18th century paper money was issued in most of the American colonies. The early American colonists had few coins and often used commodities, such as furs and tobacco, as the medium of exchange. The Britain coins the colonists had usually soon went back to Britain to pay for imports. A major source of coins in the colonial period was the favorable trade balance with the Spanish colonies. This caused an inflow of Spanish pesos. Because of the need for coins, the government of some colonies attempted to attract Spanish coins by raising the price of Spanish dollars in terms of shillings. Most of the Spanish