Warning, serious coin geekiness ahead. So some of you may know about the precious metal drain that affected the later Roman empire. Seems that there was a serious trade imbalance, with the Romans wanting silk and spices from the Silk Road and China not needing anything than silver from Rome. This is probably a huge reason silver coins disappeared from Roman coinage system. While on vacation in Thailand, I brought along "Money, Markets, and Trade in Early Southeast Asia" by Robert Wicks. Nothing like a good book on coins for relaxing, right? Well, in it, it describes China's precious metal drain in trade with SE Asia. Seems the Chinese wanted exotic wood, kingfisher feathers, gold, ivory, rhino horn, etc but the SE Asian empires did not want Chinese goods to the same extent. The net effect of this appears to be that all of the silver being sucked out of Europe for silk was not accumulating in China like I always thought, but instead was being used to pay Chinese debt with SE Asia kingdoms. It got so severe that even copper cash coins were being sucked into SE Asia to pay for imports, so much so that the Song, (continued by the Yuan and Ming empires), were forced to introduce paper money and force copper cash to be turned in for paper money to prevent all money being taken out of China. So, not only did international trade force Rome to stop issuing silver coins, it further required the invention of paper money. I just love geeky connections like this. So, net net, your denarii that were never struck ended up as Burmese Pyu money, or Thai Dvaravati coins.
I seem to recall reading a similar post about this somewhere, once upon a time. It was something I'd never thought about before. Might've been about gold, somewhere else, come to think of it. But anyway... It's kind of interesting to consider the economic history behind the coins. To us, they're collectibles, but it was a different story when they were money, of course.
