Canada Had No Paper Money Until 1685 — Soldiers Were Paid in Cut-Up Playing Cards

Subscribe to the channel    / @dominionnotes   Before 1685, a debt in Quebec was settled in beaver pelts. Or wheat. Or moose skins. All three were legal tender, because every coin France shipped over sailed home the next autumn. Then a colony that trusted almost nothing took a signed piece of pasteboard at face value, and kept taking it for seventy-five years. The question is not how. It is who was promising to pay. It begins in Quebec in June 1685, with an intendant named Jacques de Meulles, a garrison owed its wages, and money ships that never arrived. From there it runs through three signatures on the back of a quarter of a playing card, a silver coin worth a third more in Quebec than in Paris, a Crown that saw where this would lead from six weeks away by sea, and an ending in which people who had only obeyed the law were left with nothing. What made the first cards work is one sentence de Meulles wrote to Paris that September. It is not the sentence anybody quotes. Those cards are believed to be the first paper money ever issued by a Western government. The note in your wallet runs on the same principle, and carries signatures for the same reason. If you want to understand what actually holds a currency together, not what it happens to be made of, subscribe. New videos every week on the banks, taxes, mortgages and pensions that quietly run this country, and the systems they replaced. #CanadianHistory #EconomicHistory #NewFrance