Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network.

I'm your host Heather Tuscoe, and I'm a storyteller who makes history accessible because

I believe it's a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the

universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity. This is episode 119, and today we are

going to talk about economics, specifically the rise of credit in Tudor England. But first, I want to

remind you of two things. First, the free Tudor Summit is happening this coming

weekend, March 2nd and 3rd. It's two days of talks from leading tutor scholars like Tracy Borman

and Leanda Delisle, plus bloggers and authors galore. It's all online virtual so you can sign up and

watch from anywhere. You can go to www.tutorsummit.com to sign up and see the full list of speakers.

Also, as a special for the tutor summits, tickets to TutorCon are $50 off until March the 8th.

Remember, TutorCon is the live event we're doing in October in Pennsylvania. I have a lovely new

site up at www.tutorcon. info, where you can see all the

speakers and get all the information you need in order to plan your trip. And the tickets will be

$50 off until the 8th of March. So I have been reading the books by the philosopher historian

Yuval Noah Harari. And if you haven't read his book Sapiens, a brief history of humankind, you have to get it and you have to read it. It's amazing. So in his book and then the second one after that, homo deus, he discusses how a particular species of animal, the Homo sapien, went from just one more species

to the one that completely dominates the world with a lot of focus on the cognitive revolution.

And I'm not going to get into all of that here because this is a tutor history podcast.

But in his work, he writes about the history of money as a unit of exchange and the level of trust that we need to have both in each other and in the government or person that issues the money and that money is in fact worth something. Consider that a dollar bill or a five pound note is just a piece of paper. You can't eat it, you can't drink it, and you can't take shelter in it. But you can go to a

store and exchange it for food or water or shelter. And the reason you can do that is because the person

who owns the store trusts that they, in turn, will be able to take your money and use it for

their own shelter and food and water. The system works because we all believe and trust in it. And it's

made a huge amount of

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