ABSTRACT
John Hicks believed that money was created by the merchant. Merchants found it convenient if the value of a commodity could be ‘stored’ in some way to carry out exchange, so Hicks saw money originating in the ‘store of value’ function (Hicks 1969, p. 63). He noted in his Theory of Economic History, however, that ‘Chinese money did not pass through a stage in which the “store of value” function was preeminent, [it] passed straight into being a means of payment’ (Hicks 1969, p. 68). This sentence suggests that Hicks admitted the possibility of several paths of monetary evolution, but he did not explicitly outline what caused these diverse paths of development.
