The Netherlands in Maps: Geographies of money in the Netherlands

Money is ‘the great god of our age’ (Leyshon & Thrift 1997). It appears in our society in many ways: money can be viewed as an economy, a sociology, an anthropology and, last but not least, a geography. The geography of money is very complex, since the spatial dimensions of money and finance are manysided, very dynamic and more often than not invisible. Moreover, money has a range of appearances, ranging from barter via tangible coins and banknotes through sunk capital in the form of investments in fixed capital goods to virtual money. In the latter case, money is dematerialised. It is then no longer a commodity which is transported. Money is increasingly ‘a set of double entries briefly etched in computer memories’ (Leyshon & Thrift 1997). Crucial to the geography of money is the connotation that money is a way of overcoming spatial gaps of supply and demand, of credit and liability. Money is a means of timespace distanciation. It enables transactions between actors widely separated in time and space (Giddens 1990). Many institutions and many types of financial flows are involved in this process. Financial institutions and markets continuously collect, receive and earn monies from all the localities and regions of a nation, for themselves or on behalf of third parties. These monies are then recycled back across the regional, national and international systems. At any time, a large number of money circuits exist, including banking, mortgage finance, insurance, pension funds and stocks and shares. Immense sums of money, credit and debt are thus moved around in and through space. These financial flows shape the wider systems of production, employment, income and welfare (Martin 1999). Despite the many ways in which money thus directly and indirectly effects space, it has long been neglected or marginalised in human geography and other social sciences (Schamp et al. 1993; Corbridge & Thrift 1994). The historic neglect of the geography of money in economic geography and regional economics has been attributed to the prevailing neoclassical growth theory, with its assumptions of free and costless movement of capital and perfect information flows between regions (Richardson 1973). At the same time the complex and multi-sided appearances of money in the world’s rapidly changing economic, institutional and technological landscapes can be held responsible for the minor interest in the landscapes of money among human geographers. However, since the late 1980s economic geographers and regional economists have begun to study the various geographies of money (Martin 1999). This text concludes this volume’s theme of money and space in the Netherlands. This year’s theme has been inspired by the introduction of the euro currency in 12 European countries, including the Netherlands (Van Steen & Pellenbarg 2002). In what follows we will first briefly discuss the history of the guilder, the Dutch currency, and elaborate on