Cowries and Conquest: Towards a Subalternate Quality Theory of Money

Abstract

In the beginning of the world we had the forge and we forged things, we had weavinglooms and we wove our clothes, we had oracle huts where we consulted the oracle, and we had boats from which we caught fish. We had no guns. We had no cowrie-money ( akwá ). If you went to the market you took beans in order to exchange them for sweet potatoes. You exchanged something specific for something else. Then the king brought the cowrie-money. What did the king do in order to bring the cowrie-money? He caught people and broke their legs and their arms.