Monetary Surrogates of the Merchants in the Second Half of the Nineteenth – Early Twentieth Century
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15407/uhj2020.05.055Keywords:
exchange crisis, merchants, cash, money substitutes (monetary surrogates), private money, metal vouchers, money counterfeiting, Russian Empire, Austro-Hungarian EmpireAbstract
The aim of study is to introduce into the scientific circulation the previously unknown issuers of the private monetary surrogates and to establish the full chain and mechanism of their use, as well as to analyze the practice of the imperial government in associating such issues with the counterfeiting.
Research methodology of the article defined by the general scientific methods; the citations of archival materials and newspaper publications were performed by transcription; the principles of historicism, systematics, objectivity, development and versatility are applied.
The scientific novelty is that for the first time in the national historiography the complete algorithm and mechanism of the use of the private monetary substitutes by the merchants during the imperial era are is completely defined and described. The practical significance of the achieved results lies in the possibility of their application in the next research areas: numismatics, history of economic, history of the monetary circulation, history of science and technology, criminalistics, as well as in compiling of the educational and methodological literature.
The main results of the research. In the 1860’s in some regions of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires in the local farms and manufacturing enterprises has appeared a private money (bonds, tokens, vouchers, stamps, coupons etc.), the emergence of which was caused by the lack of small coin denominations for change. A government decree prohibited the use of the local monetary surrogates in the form of stamps, receipts, labels, tokens and other marks or obligations that were giving an opportunity for the consumer to get a certain amount of goods or services with paying by this money substitutes. Analyzing the materials of the historical archives, we managed to recreate and establish the full chain and the essence of private money of the entrepreneurs who were operating in Ukraine.
