Bills of Exchange

The 17th century’s wire transfer — and a quiet revolution in what “money” meant.

How They Worked

A bill of exchange was a written order: person A instructs person B (usually a banker) to pay person C a specified sum at a future date. The beauty was that no gold had to move. A merchant in Amsterdam could pay a supplier in Venice by drawing a bill on a bank in London. The bill itself could be endorsed and passed along, effectively becoming money — a piece of paper worth whatever amount was written on it, backed by the creditworthiness of the parties involved.

Why They Mattered

Shipping gold across 17th-century Europe was expensive, slow, and dangerous (bandits, pirates, wars). Bills of exchange let money move at the speed of a letter. They also let merchants convert between currencies without visiting a money-changer. The system depended entirely on trust and reputation — if a bill was drawn on a known, reliable house, it was as good as gold. If the drawer was unknown, good luck finding anyone to accept it.

The Bigger Picture

Bills of exchange had existed since the medieval Italian banking houses, but by the late 1600s they were the circulatory system of European commerce. They represent exactly the kind of abstraction the novel keeps returning to: the shift from physical stuff (coins, gold) to symbolic representations of value. Leibniz would have appreciated the parallel to his work on symbolic logic.

In the Novel

Eliza grasps bills of exchange instinctively — they’re part of her financial education and her rise as a trader. Jack does not. This gap between them isn’t just about financial literacy; it’s about their fundamentally different relationships to abstraction. Jack deals in things he can touch. Eliza deals in ideas about things.