ABSTRACT
The centuries spanning the discovery of America (1492) and the termination of the Napoleonic Wars (1814) have exercised a remarkable fascination for the historians of Europe. Western societies, their way of life and thinking, experienced in those years an internal qualitative expansion which also contained a geographical or spatial expression. It is clear that money and prices, whether measured in units of commodities such as a basket of rice, a roll of silk, a moulded block of salt or in units of precious metals, gold and silver, copper and rare cowrie shells, had served the economic purposes of societies in old Eurasia for a long time. Adam Smith in his role as the confident historian had no difficulty in asserting that between 1630 and 1640 or about 1636 precisely, the effect of the discovery of silver mines in America in raising the ratio between units of silver and commodities had passed its peak.
