During the colonial era, the French colonial government in Canada experimented with paper money printed on the back of playing cards. The first experiment lasted from 1685 to 1719. In the first years, there was little inflation in spite of a rapidly expanding stock of playing card money. It is...

This volume is a collection of papers on money, currency and economic history.0Money and currency have always been used for buying, paying, exchanging values, services or commodities. However there has always been a deep contradiction between the national character of coins and the international...

Cover -- Contents -- Foreword -- Introduction -- 1. A Currency at the Service of the 'Colonial Pact' -- 2. The CFA System -- 3. Resistance and Reprisal -- 4. France in Command -- 5. At the Service of the Francafrique -- 6. An Obstacle to Development -- 7. An Unsustainable Status Quo -- Epilogue...

"John Law's System was a radical restructuring of French public finances, carried out from 1716 to 1720. It involved on the one hand a conversion of the existing French public debt into something like government equity, on the other hand the replacement of commodity money with fiat money. For...