I mentioned previously that in the West, the money-relation arose out of the wealth accumulation taking place in the medieval Christian world, which is true in a limited sense but also imprecise, and needs to be qualified.
Money relations tend to exist persistently in different forms and levels of complexity throughout the lifespan of any given civilization, but it is not until later stages of maturity that the relation becomes a dominant driving force of a given society's development.
Money implies wealth, and wealth implies accumulated work, which implies time and energy, and it has to take some time for enough wealth to become available that it approaches the threshold required to serve as the dominant driving logic of a whole society. To use wealth to beget wealth, you have to have a lot of it, and not be constantly concerned with staying fed and safe from attack.
This dominance occurs cyclically, both over the course of larger periods and then cyclically within those very periods: in terms of the limited information we have about the semi-mythical origins of Rome, the Romans were a military society (and to an extent remained one in character) driven by the necessity of military conquest of rivals, complete with a driving ethic of practical virtues and an obsession with honor and glory.
It wasn't until after the Punic Wars (and the trauma of their near destruction) and the sudden influx of massive amounts of wealth in the form of booty and land that the money relation really started to take over and guide the development of their Republic, and you had lamentation after lamentation from the conservative statesmen about the collective loss of virtue and military discipline as a result.
After the Republic was eaten from the inside out by the money relation running its course, it took a re-constitution of the society as a military dictatorship, going back to its roots literally by necessity as the society went up in flames.
The military relations then ran out their course through the collapse of Western Rome, and then it was the Christian thought and the "wagging finger" that became dominant, and over a long and bloody period of time we would approach our moment in which the money relation arose in the course of the wealth accumulation taking place in the Christian world, and today it is breaking down once again.
And underneath these qualifications is a deeper complexity we could only hint at, and so it goes. But a more general point remains: the money relation comes and goes as a dominant driver of human affairs in history, and with every unique period of time that it emerges, it emerges with a unique character particular to that given period.
Over time we may witness linear innovations which appear and then persist, such as the emergence of interest and the evolution of accounting, economic concepts and laws, representative technologies of coinage, fiat, electronic accounting, and so on, and modalities of credit, but then a given society in the course of history may have a very different relationship to these things, and so the character of the money relation changes with each society's relationship to it, and it even changes in the course of a given society's development.
The Bronze Age empires had a very different relationship to credit and interest than we do today, namely that they were much more comfortable treating debt as negotiable, whereas we treat it as sacred and inviolable. And it was only a couple of hundred years ago that the Catholic church was twisting itself into pretzels in order to harness the financial power of interest while officially hewing to the traditional Christian doctrine of any sort of interest as "usurious."
