ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 traces all major episodes of high inflation or hyperinflation that occurred in the world before the twentieth century, starting with Wang Mang’s monetary adventure at the dawn of the first millennium and ending with the contrasting experiences of inflation in the North and the South during America’s Civil War in the 1860s. Modern hyperinflation has ancient precursors, precisely because rulers in the past, just as those in the present, were able to take advantage of benefits made possible by the course of monetary evolution. When such benefits were abused, disasters generally followed, which has been the pattern from the earliest times up to the twentieth century.
