Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 92

Bligh began by outlawing the use of both rum and promissory notes as mediums of exchange. Rum was still the usual form of payment for many workers and traders. Promissory notes were IOUs that passed from one hand to another and could be traded in and redeemed by the individuals who had first released them.

Both rum payments and notes of exchange had sprung up because Britain had failed to provide the colony with any form of currency in the first place. (After all, why should convicts living as happy self-supporting peasants need something so complicated as money?) These became the common mode of making exchanges and payments throughout the colony.

If rum and promissory notes could be replaced as forms of exchange, well and good, but Bligh didn’t replace them, he just outlawed them. No established business owner in the colony could do business without these forms of pseudo-currency. Without them, the wheels of commerce and daily life would grind to a halt.