Money and its alternatives in Early Modern extractive industry: The many media of exchange in mercury mining

From Firenze University Press Book: Alternative currencies. Commodities and services as exchange currencies in the monetarized economies of the 13th to 18th centuries

Thomas Max Safley, University of Pennsylvania, United States

There’s an old song of uncertain provenance, first recorded in the 1940s, that contains the following lyric:

You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go. I owe my soul to the company story (Travis 1946).

The artist who first recorded the song, Merle Travis, explained that the lines, «You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt», came from a letter written by his brother John, who was a coal miner in Appalachia (Wikipedia, “Sixteen Tons”). Another line came from their father, also a coal miner, who would say: «I can’t afford to die; I owe my soul to the company store.» They refer to the scrip system and to the debt bondage it created, which were commonplaces of American extractive industry. Miners received their wages not in cash but in non-transferable credit vouchers — a rudimentary form of fiat money — that could be exchanged only for goods sold at the company store, making cash savings impossible. Many of them also lived in company-owned dormitories or houses, the rent for which was automatically deducted from their pay. The resort by mining companies to scrip and other «alternatives to money» became illegal in the United States under the Federal Minimum Wage Act of 1961. The scrip system appears to be a linear descendant of the much older truck — or tommy — system, whereby workers received their wages not in the form of a voucher but in a combination of cash and commodities (Aspin 1995; Hilton 1958; Ruegg 1901; Valentinitsch 1981, 226–35). The values assessed for those commodities were often manipulated and could rise so high that many workers received no payment in cash but ended a pay period in debt to their employers. The use of commodity and/or convertible moneys was a customary feature of British industry, including mining, from the mid-15th to the early-19th century, when its use was gradually prohibited by act of Parliament. As these examples suggest, alternatives to money take various forms and have a long history in mining. This paper takes up their use in the mines of central and eastern Alpine Europe from the mid-15th to the late-17th centuries — especially the mercury mines at Idrija in the former Habsburg Duchy of Carniola, present-day Slovenia — to examine how alternatives to money emerged and functioned in public and private manufacturing. Alternatives of all sorts were ubiquitous there, present even in its political economy. The regents considered the mineral riches of their realm to be regalian rights. To exploit them, they granted mining privileges in the form of shares (Kuxen) to loyal supporters, merchant entrepreneurs and aristocratic landlords, who became mine stakeholders and operators (Gewerke). In return for the opportunity to profit from the mineral trade, they rendered taxes on their production in cash and kind, the so-called Fron und Wexel. Commercial mining at Idrija required more than privilege and interest, however. It required international connections and commercial savvy to bring the minerals to market. Foreign merchant-financiers could provide both, but they needed the protection of the state in the form of considerations and regulations that lowered transaction costs, prevented competition and limited uncertainty. In return for monopoly rights and tax exemptions that increased profits from the sale of mercury, they advanced credit, shared intelligence and performed services for the state. Local agents or factors (Verweser) represented the interests of capital, whether the operators or the merchants, and saw to the running of the mines. Like factors in all branches of premodern commerce and finance, their salaries took the form not only of money but also of opportunities to seize whatever gainful enterprise came their way. Mining also required highly skilled, experienced labor. Recruited from established mining regions and proudly self-conscious, the miners extracted and refined the saleable commodities, laboring for wages of various sorts, but exercised little control over production or remuneration. At Idrija, therefore, alternatives to money took many forms at all levels: financial instruments and commercial commodities, economic opportunity and social status, legal privilege and political preferment, cash and commodities. Taking the extraction, production and sale of mercury as a test case, with particular attention to the miners and their wages, this paper seeks to demonstrate that «alternatives» in whatever form they may take — tangible or intangible, fixed or moveable — have less to do with shortages of hard cash or the inhumanity of hard hearts, though these can and often do play a role, than with what I have elsewhere referred to as the «ecology of work» (Safley 2019a, 2). The phrase attempts to suggest how the interaction of physical environments, regulatory systems, market forces, social relations or economic institutions, to name but a few possibilities, shape production in workshops and factories. In the particular context of mercury mining at Idrija, the ecology of work determined the broad reliance on ‘alternatives to money’: their use and abuse, their persistence and intractability.

DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0347–0.05

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