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The Evolution of Humanities Understanding of Currency

Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley
9 min readNov 7, 2024

When investing in currencies, the first step is to understand what a currency is and the value of money; this article will discuss the history of currency and different governments’ approaches to financing and capital.

Our journey to understand currency begins with a significant milestone in human history — the creation of humanity’s first currency, the shekel, by the Mesopotamians 5,000 years ago.

This may seem distant and irrelevant, but it forms the foundation of our modern understanding of money.

This is relevant because the first step in understanding investing, money, and finance is understanding what money is.

Money was a method of replacing a bartering system, and the original money was tied to the value of the grain.

In 1971, America came off the gold standard.

It broke with the Bretton Woods agreement, which was signed in 1944.

In this agreement, America became the globe’s first global currency and guaranteed the value of gold, which was tied to the US dollar.

America would be the exchange currency from Gold to dollars.

Again, all this information can be overwhelming and hard to grasp.

This is why I will explain currency and its relation to finance, capitalism, and government in this article.

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Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley
Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley

Written by Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley

I have been writing from 2014 to the present day; my writing is focused on history, politics, culture, geopolitics and other related topics.

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