Book: Financial Vipers of Venice
Author: Joseph P. Farrell
ISBN: 978-1-93623-974-0
Previous: Bruno’s Missing Trial Papers
We started this series with a heretic burned in Rome and ended with cardboard factories eating his trial records. In between, Joseph P. Farrell tried to convince us that medieval Venice was not just a rich trading city. It was a financial weapons lab whose techniques never really went away.
Book: Financial Vipers of Venice | Author: Joseph P. Farrell | ISBN: 978-1-93623-974-0
Joseph P. Farrell opens Financial Vipers of Venice with two quotes that stopped me cold. Murray Rothbard says that before coinage, there was barter. David Graeber says the standard story is backwards. Virtual money came first. Coins came later. Barter was mostly a side effect. I have read both authors before, but seeing them side by side in a book about Venetian banksters made the stakes clear. This is not a dry history of exchange rates. It is an argument about what money is, and how that idea keeps changing.