1–1800s CE: (The Emergence of African Currencies — A Common Global Consequence of Commercial Revolutions Being the Development of Currencies as Tokens of Val…

1–1800s CE: (The Emergence of African Currencies — A Common Global Consequence of Commercial Revolutions Being the Development of Currencies as Tokens of Value, West African Networks Using Standardized Small Copper Ingots from the Beginning of the First Millennium CE and Possibly Earlier Plus Standard Weights of Gold Dust, Congo Basin Networks Using Cross-Shaped Copper Currency Possibly from the 300s CE Continuing to the Colonial Era, and Nzimbu Shells Serving as Currency in the Lower Congo River Region): A common consequence globally of what Ehret describes as commercial revolutions has been the eventual emergence of currencies — tokens of value to recompense sellers or buyers when the products they wished to obtain in exchange were not available or not in sufficient supply. In each region, currencies came into use not at the first stages of the commercial revolutions but usually centuries later, as exchange relations matured and became more complex. Historians have long given attention to the emergence of coinage from the seventh century BCE onward in the eastern Mediterranean, but for a truly global perspective they need to take into account all the varieties of currencies that peoples in different regions developed. The African commercial networks of West Africa put into use a currency in the form of small copper ingots of standardized size, known from the beginning of the first millennium CE though their use may well go back centuries earlier. Standard weights of gold dust served also relatively early as a currency in West Africa. In the interior Congo basin, copper currency in the shape of a cross came into use, possibly as early as the fourth century CE, and this currency continued to be used right down to the beginning of the colonial era in the late nineteenth century. In the Lower Congo River region, a different early currency long existed: nzimbu shells. The history of their use remains to be fully explored, but they are the kind of items that preserve well archaeologically. What all these currencies share is their emergence from within African commercial systems, not as imitations of Mediterranean coinage but as independent solutions to the same economic problem that coinage solved elsewhere. Different materials, different forms, same function — and each one an artifact of a commercial complexity that the standard narrative refuses to see.