Topic

Money

A shared fiction that stops working the moment it is doubted.

6: in history
13:00: average
78 min: in total
24: across the network

Money across the network →

All briefs6

13:00

Lloyd's of London

Founded 1688

Lloyd's of London began as a coffee house on Tower Street run by Edward Lloyd, where sailors and merchants gathered to arrange marine insurance informally before the participants formed a proper society in 1773. For most of its history, policies were backed by wealthy individuals called Names carrying unlimited personal liability, a system that paid off through disasters like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the Titanic but nearly collapsed the market when asbestos liability claims from decades earlier surfaced in the 1990s, bankrupting a meaningful share of the Names underwriting the losses. The market has since restructured around corporate capital with limited liability.

13:00

Acts of Union 1707

30 April 1707

The Acts of Union 1707 followed a decade of Scottish economic disaster, most sharply the collapse of the Darien scheme, a failed colonial venture in Panama that lost the country's investors well over £150,000. Negotiators from both parliaments, thirty-one apiece, met in London through the spring and summer of 1706 and produced a twenty-five-article treaty offering Scotland a cash payment known as the Equivalent, parliamentary representation, and guaranteed protection for its church and legal system. The Scottish Parliament ratified the treaty in January 1707 by a vote of 110 to 67, with 123 of its 300 members absent, amid public opposition strong enough to produce riots in several Scottish cities and allegations, still debated, that some votes had been bought.

13:00

Bank of England

Founded 1694

Founded in 1694 to raise money for naval rebuilding after defeat at the Battle of Beachy Head, the Bank of England began as a private institution lending to the Crown at interest, secured by shipping duties. It stayed in private hands for more than two and a half centuries until the postwar Attlee government nationalised it in 1946, and it did not gain formal independence to set its own interest rates until the late 1990s. Along the way it weathered the end of the gold standard, sterling devaluations, decimalisation, and the 2008 financial crisis, which prompted new regulatory bodies under its umbrella.

13:00

California gold rush

1848–1854

James Marshall's discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in January 1848 drew roughly three hundred thousand people to California within seven years, most of whom made little or no profit while merchants supplying them, and California itself, gained wealth and statehood by 1850. The boom also brought organised violence against Native Californians on a scale some historians now describe as genocide, a consequence the gold rush's popular memory has generally left out.

13:00

Pike's Peak gold rush

1858

A Georgian prospector's 1858 discovery near present-day Denver drew an estimated hundred thousand people into the southern Rockies, fast enough to justify creating Colorado Territory in 1861, years before the region had otherwise earned that status. The same wave of settlement fed the tensions that produced the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, an atrocity historians treat as a direct consequence of the demographic pressure the gold rush created, even though the Wikipedia record of the rush itself says comparatively little about that connection.

13:00

Medici Bank

1397–1499

Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici founded the bank in 1397 with 10,000 gold florins, building a holding-company structure of semi-independent branch partnerships and using bills of exchange to earn profit on currency conversion rather than charging interest banned under canon law. Wealth from the bank, later boosted by a papal monopoly on alum from Tolfa, let Cosimo de' Medici become Florence's unofficial ruler by 1434 without ever holding formal office. Bad loans to rulers including the English crown, mismanagement at the Bruges branch, and Lorenzo the Magnificent's neglect of the business left the bank unable to survive the political shock of the French invasion of 1494.