Cowrie shells, now a commodity that can be bought at department stores, were once a precious item of trade.
Cowrie shells are normally seen on necklaces. You can grab one for pretty cheap in department stores.
But even though they’re pretty worthless nowadays, these tiny little shells were once a form of currency.
Let’s take a ride back into time.
(Very) Short History of Commerce
Commerce began in 10,000-5000 B.C. This was the first period of barter and people traded cattle (they were good for food, clothing, and was able to reproduce).
But cows were hard to trade, especially if the trades were between people located far away from one another. As you could imagine, these things are big, slow, and are constantly farting.
Fortunately, commerce evolved sometime in 1200 B.C.
In this period (the second), shells and precious materials were used to trade. And one of the most valuable resources was cowrie shells.
I know, this sounds kind of ridiculous. How much value can a tiny seashell have?
Well, I’m not 100 percent sure about its rarity, but cowrie shells were a commodity that was durable, easy to transport, and difficult to forge and reproduce. This is why so many nations liked to use it for trading.
In ancient China, these shells were so important that the cowrie pictograph was used as their character for money.
It was also used as currency in India and Southeast Asia, if you were wondering.
The history of cowrie shells shows that nothing is actually valuable. The value of things is subjective. An item will value (dollar-wise) whatever you and many, many others value it at.
If one day, you and many, many others (and it has to be a lot of people or else it won’t work) decide to make a pair of sneakers cost $1000.00, then that pair of sneakers will be valued at that price (oh, wait, this is already happening!). It won’t matter if it only costs $5 to make and is retailed at $150.00.
The value of that pair will cost whatever the mass decides it will cost.
Now, isn’t that amazing?
READ MORE: What is Economic Anthropology?
P.S. This is also the reason why bricks of gold are currently used as currency, and why crypto-currency is such a big thing right now. It’s because masses of people value them.