Clausewitz defined war as “politics by other means” and silver is inextricably linked to that endeavour starting with Persia’s Darius II who mined 250 tonnes of the metal in what is now Turkey, to Alexander of Athens who built such a pretty bank vault for his silver visitors still thinks it is a temple, to Crassus who funded the politics between Caesar and Pompeii which eventually created quite a good Globe Theatre play, to the Rothchild’s who funded both sides in the Napoleonic wars to my country in the last century which funded two wars the Brits engaged in to preserve colonial power or democracy depending on your preference for tall tales.
For collectors wars are inevitably going to make your hoard more valuable so long as you resist the patriotic cries to melt it down into The King’s Shilling.
So as collectors should we be in favour of politics by other means or against it? On the one hand it increases the price/demand for the metal and temporarily makes us all feel rather wealthy, on the other hand, as is happening right now, enormous amounts of collectable silver of historic interest is bunged into blast furnaces and emerges as something else, usually coin or security for same.
England today owes its vast collection of 18th and 19th century of silver to an absence of civil war since the 17th century and a willingness to develop colonial capability to acquire it. The British have always been remarkably democratic when it comes to its collection. They really don’t mind who controls the resource, they are perfectly content to relieve them of the responsibility of distributing the proceeds. The Spaniards have special reason to be grateful to them starting back in Elizabethan times with the licensed privateers like Hawkins, Drake and Raleigh.
There was a time when the British Isles had its own gold, silver and tin mines. The Romans didn’t invade this country to sit on the beach at Bognor Regis, or build walls to defend against the intractable Celt as the Emperor Hadrian was forced to, but for minerals.
This early trend saw all manner of folk including a rather famous Jewish prophet’s uncle Joseph of Arimathea arriving to trade metals. His visit was immortalized by Blake in that seminal hymn “Jerusalem” with the line. “And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green”
Joseph wasn’t here to help Milton or Blake write lyrics, he was here for tin and silver which the Romans needed to pay and arm soldiers to make political advances without too much back-chat.
Today silver is again a weapon of war. An essential ingredient in the solder that cements computer parts for Tomahawk Missiles or allows the creation of cellphones off which drones to harry the enemy are controlled.
Here in my hometown former owners, the Teme-Augama Anishnabai, ran out of lead bullets to fire into the Catholics whose Jesuit priests were leading the invasion of their homeland and resorted to silver to make musket bullets.
As soon as the medics started digging silver out of the combatants they suggested a cease fire to discuss this new weapon of actual belligerence. That discussion continues to this day and is now called indigenous land claims, a vital ingredient in the defence against the US seeking to control Canadian fresh water. We control 25% of it globally and the US has to keep growing veggies in the Imperial Valley to feed us all.
In summary, politics is not just the silver lining for political man, it is the essence of it without which we would inhabit a very different world. Various empires have tried other metals and ores but they never really caught on.The Pacific Coast lot, today we call them Haida up here, tried scallop shells. The Ancient Egyptians came up with Lapis Lazuli, which was really only rare because it came from Afghanistan and the religious leaders back then were tricky to deal with. Gold is also much prized. There are streets around the Bank of England which allow you to walk or drive over hundreds of tons of the stuff tucked away in bank vaults below you on behalf of various client countries.
But somehow silver has remained the arbiter of financing “politics by other means”. It’s expensive enough you can give a soldier a coin or a purse of coins and he feels he has got something with which to buy a drink or the affections of an obliging female and cheap enough you can afford enough soldiers to make a political difference.
The perfect compromise metal.
CRWW
