Trust yourself!
Except if you're a dodgy con artist. Then trust other people's trust.
Hello,
What a week this has been: much to read and plenty of numismatics in the news!
Highlights for me have been reading about life in eleventh-century Egypt and the Byzantine Empire.
(It has also been super busy with a couple of big freelance projects and helping my mother-in-law move house, and continued cold and sickness in the house, so if I owe you a message on here, please bear with me!)
I was also diverted, though, by a much more recent story of crime, subterfuge and economic opportunity.
Police in India were recently surprised to find a large stack of pseudo-banknotes but with a remarkable difference: instead of carrying the face of Gandhi, as is conventional, they carried the face of Bollywood actor Anupam Kher.
This story took me down some wonderful by-ways, including into the recent history of so-called ‘angadias’. These are networks of informal bankers, who specialise in moving valuable goods around India, especially currency, gold, jewels and diamonds. They travel particularly between big money and jewel centres in western India, like Ahmedabad and Mumbai. Estimates of the annual amounts moved around by angadias range from around £6 million to £9 billion GBP.1
These days, they apparently move in caravans, because it is easier to arrange police escorts that way (very much in an echo of centuries I study, when merchants from Tadmor-Palmyra on the Euphrates probably organised guards for caravans on the same principle).
Most interesting to me is that the entire basis for the angadia business is trust: these are usually family firms, often specialising in a single valuable good or a single route between places, and when, for whatever reason, regular banking won’t do, the alternative is to give a person (usually a man) a lot of incredibly valuable stuff, agree a fee and trust that he won’t run off with it.
And this works most of the time. I say this with confidence because the internet tells me so, but it is also just common sense: if it didn’t work damn near all the time, people wouldn’t do it. Not that many shipments of millions of rupees would need to go AWOL for the system to collapse, but it hasn’t, at least for decades and likely, in some form, for much longer.
But, as a historian, you can never say never and those bank notes turned out to be tied up in a scandalous case of attempted robbery that also involved creating a fake angadia business.
The scheme, in its entirety, is hard to discern from press releases, but involved a crook who needed money quickly to pay court-ordered compensation to the victims of an earlier fraud, who therefore decided to… commit more fraud. If at first you don’t succeed, etc. A fake movie deal was involved somewhere along the way, too, and I guess we’ll learn more as the case comes to court.
Anyway, none of this is small potatoes: the fake Anupam Kher notes seized by the police had a face value of around £250,000. And it opens windows into several different aspects of trust in economic and social life:
An unsuccessful fraudster decides to concoct a scheme involving faking being a member of a business entirely reliant on high levels of trust and interpersonal guarantee. That should never have seemed like a good idea, and it wasn’t!
Needing some cash as part of this fraud, he decided a) to outsource the printing to a commercial printer (whatever happened to basement forgers?) and b) to put a famous actor on them instead of Gandhi. Apparently, this was because he had enough faith in law enforcement, in the good citizenship of his fellow persons or in his own incompetence, that he decided it was best to play it safe. Notes that looked obviously fake would not arouse the suspicion of the printers and would mean that, if he got caught, he could not be charged with the serious crime of actually trying to pass of fake bills as real.
Having £250,000 worth of worthless ‘toy’ money, the criminal masterminds wrapped them up exactly as if they were new notes from the bank, trusting that people involved in high-level business, mainly via cash transactions, wouldn’t bother to actually open up the wads of money and look at it.
Lots of different kinds of trust intersect here:
that self-confidence we’re always told to have more of (except when we shouldn’t); trust in institutions (clearly, they kinda expected to get caught);
trust in the angadia system (that they hoped to exploit because the point of high trust systems is that, if you can get past, or fake, the substantial up-front checks, there are usually very few subsequent obstacles: once trust is established, it substitutes for those additional verifications in order to get things done with acceptable speed and efficiency);
trust in other people’s trust in habit, routine and systems (expecting a major bullion dealer not to check banknotes is probably one of the less stupid things this group did because, even though it didn’t work out, currencies are useful exactly because we don’t feel we have to check each coin or note every time we use it. The bigger the sums somebody is used to dealing with, the better the odds they won’t bother to check what could, for somebody else, be an enormous sum. People are like that: we get used to things.)
We rarely get to see this level of granularity in the trust infrastructures that made ancient and medieval societies go and that is what draws me to cases like this. They expose the inner workings of ways of thinking, of interacting and, crucially, of scaling up complexity, that humans have been doing for millennia.
I can’t tell you for sure that some con artist in the Middle Ages concocted a scheme exactly like this one, but I can tell you with a pretty high degree of confidence that a lot of con artists in the Middle Ages concocted schemes quite a lot like this one.
We see echoes of it in legislation: want to find ancient and medieval legislation looking especially vindictive and brutal? Check out the anti-forgery statues. Amputation of hands is not uncommon. Execution is pretty routine, even in legal systems that were chary about the death penalty. There is also a faint air of panic about it, as law makers tried to shut down all of the possible ways that people might short-cut a critical system of trust - the coinage that made markets and state business work.
In the sixth-century compilation of Roman law, put together under the orders of the emperor Justinian I, for example, counterfeiting money comes in Book 9, which looks mostly like a grab bag of Very Bad Things. Lots of the books are organised around themes like inheritance or trade and exchange. Book 9 features:
Reviling the emperor
Treason
A guardian corrupting his female ward
Public or private violence
The rape of virgins, widows and nuns
Assassins
People who kill their parents or children
The violation of tombs
Kidnapping
Extortion
Sacrilege
Torture
Damaging the levees of the Nile (which is to say, monumentally screwing with the food security of the empire’s biggest population centres, which were all fed on Egyptian grain)
In the middle of it are the laws relating to forgery and counterfeiting. I have cherry picked here - there are some more mundane things in Book 9, like cattle thieving, defamatory libel and swindling (check it out for yourself here), but the theme, insofar as there is one other than disapproval, is crimes that corrode perceived foundations of trust in society: bonds between parents and children, the sanctity of the dead and of religious places, the ability to go about your daily life without fearing kidnap, torture or assassination, respect for the emperor and the law.
We can debate the importance of any of these, and people did in antiquity and the Middle Ages, but what gets onto the list is different from the sense that there should be a list of things that can be relied on, believed in and expected to work.
Money is, usually, one of those things. Justinian’s code was a compilation, so we can see various reactions. Take this one from a law of 326:
When anyone makes counterfeit money, We order that his entire property shall be confiscated to Our Treasury, for We wish that money shall be coined only in Our mints. Those who are guilty of counterfeiting have committed high treason, and a reward is promised to their accusers. Whenever a counterfeiter of solidi, or anyone who has placed them in circulation, is convicted, he shall instantly, and without delay, be put to death by fire.
I know I said that the Romans could be very unpleasant but death by fire is not hugely common in Justinian’s code.
And take this slightly later law, which I abbreviate for readability but recommend in full if you are interested:
As certain makers of counterfeit money are perpetrating their crime in secret, all persons are notified that they are required to detect men of this kind, so that… they may be delivered up to the judge, and immediately be put to torture to compel them to reveal their accomplices, and then be punished as they deserve… If any soldier should permit a criminal of this description… to escape, he shall be punished with death; and anyone not a soldier, who is guilty of such an offence, shall be denied the right of appeal… Any house or field where counterfeiting has taken place shall be confiscated to the Treasury, and if the owner was in the neighborhood, he shall be punished for carelessness or neglect, even if he was not aware of the commission of that offence, unless being ignorant in the beginning, he divulged the crime as soon as he found it out... When, however, he was at a great distance from his house or his land at the time, he will sustain no injury, but the agent in charge of the property… together with the individual who actually perpetrated the offence, shall be capitally punished. We, however, consider widows and minors worthy of special indulgence... But if their guardians are in the neighborhood, they will incur the penalty, for they should not be ignorant of what their wards are doing; and if they are solvent, as much of their property shall be forfeited to the Treasury as their wards would have been compelled to pay had they been convicted.
There is trust again, right in the middle of everything. Specifically, we have an effort by the state to enable everybody to trust the currency by persuading nobody to allow bonds of trust between neighbours or family to come first. There will be no looking the other way. That it is even necessary to state that widows and children might be treated with greater leniency (than complete destitution or death) is striking.
When it comes to using law as a source for history, though, there is an interesting paradox: laws tell us what the people in charge in the past (or at least, who thought they were in charge) did NOT want people to do, but they also tell us what people DEFINITELY DID DO. After all, there isn’t much point making laws against things nobody is doing.2
And coin evidence bears this out: forged coins are nearly as old as not-forged coins.
There are bad forgeries, that look dodgy a mile off - think iron coins with a thin film of gold or silver on them.
There are better forgeries, including cast copies of official coins made using alloys with slightly less valuable metals in them. There are versions of official coins that were probably never meant to pass as ‘real’ and were only made for fun or for decoration, or far outside the state that issued the real thing. I wrote about some of these found in India a while back.
There are whole coinages, that really are ‘real’ (as in, they really were used as currencies by large communities), designed to look a bit like ‘real’ coinages that belonged to larger, more prestigious or older states, letting the new coinages ‘borrow’ a bit of trust from somewhere else.
Exactly where we look for the lines between forgeries, imitations, copies, or entirely derivative coinage systems overlaps with all of the complexities in those bank notes of Anupam Kher. They were meant to ‘work’ by looking pretty much like the real thing, but they were also designed to have a safety valve built in by not looking exactly like the real thing.
They were designed to help a small group of people exploit the trust of lots of other people in systems that are trustworthy because they do work most of the time. But trust is fragile. Imagine if those £250,000 worth of Anupan Kher banknotes had gotten out into circulation, if people had withdrawn their wages or the deposit on their new flat from a cash point and found themselves starring at a Bollywood icon…
The history of coined money is also the history of forged money. That is why I feel so confident looking at the details of a slightly hapless crook in Ahmedabad and seeing shadows of the worlds I study. Because deep down, money is just a code for certain kinds of trust.
Coins are material shortcuts that make all sorts of things simpler and more scalable by cutting down the time and energy it takes to trust somebody (at least for specific purposes) to the time it takes to hand over a piece of metal (or paper). But in the laws and anxiety around forgery, that so often focus not just on the forger, but on everybody around them, letting or helping a forger get away with it, we see the flip side (pun intended): the enormous complexity of overlapping, intersecting, competing human relationships that make that shortcut worth anything at all.
So, have faith in yourself. And have faith in people around you. And next time you’re tossing a coin or handing over some change, think about the vast, fragile Meccano edifice of trust it represents: it’s really quite remarkable!
There actually is a point to this, sometimes. This often relates to the othering or marginalising of ‘out’ groups, by forbidding them from doing things they weren’t or couldn’t have been doing in the first place but which links them with deeds that the law-makers might expect people to find repellent: so, for example, Early Modern and Medieval laws making it illegal for women to commit witchcraft or for Jews to deface the Host. However, these are exceptions that prove the rule. Using a legal ban against people doing something that they were not doing only works as an implicit accusation if people generally assume that when a law is passed it is because people are breaking it.