Description
Some scholars in the nominalist tradition explain the origins of money as arising from the imposition of an abstract unit of account by the state. This paper studies the genesis of the national currency in Argentina and argues that the creation of the monetary unit of account involved not the proclamation of an abstract unit but the inscription of a new unit into an existing international standard. In colonial times, the territory of contemporary Argentina was under the monetary system of the Spanish Empire. This remained the case even after the May Revolution in 1810 because civil wars and the division of the country prevented the creation of a national currency. It was only after unification in 1861, when the foundations of the nation-state began to be laid, that attempts at creating a national unit of account began: starting with law 733 of 1875, followed by law 974 of 1879, and concluding in 1881 with the passing of law 1130, known as Ley General de Monedas (General Currency Law). By reviewing legal documents and legislative debates, I show that the different attempts at creating a national unit of account involved deciding whether to set the new unit equal to or as a fraction of an existing international unit, including Japanese yens, U.S. dollars, British pounds or, what was finally chosen, Latin Monetary Union’s francs. In turn, the monetary units of all these currencies in competition for becoming world money were set to a quantity of silver or gold. Thus, even when the choice of a national unit of account was arbitrary in terms of the international monetary unit to which it would be pegged and at which proportion, it was far from an abstraction but a concrete decision within the framework of an international monetary system.
