Newfangled coins and mercenaries may have brought about democracy

In the view of many, money corrupts democracy. In the view of Francis Albarède, however, it was money, in the form of coined silver, which created democracy in the first place.

Dr Albarède is a geochemist at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France. His definition of “geochemistry” stretches, however, well beyond many people’s, into political and economic history. In particular, he has just finished running the European Research Council’s SILVER (Silver Isotopes and the Rise of Money) project. This, by studying the isotopic composition of ancient silver coins, has tried to draw conclusions about where the metal in a coin was mined, and thus about patterns of trade.