We are talking here about actual teeth, composed of tree-like ring layers of the dense, calcareous material known as “dentine,” and then coated outside with a final finish of “cementum”—a hard connective tissue that functions like the enamel on our own pearlies (sperm whale teeth only show a little cap of enamel at the tip, and sometimes not even that). In addition to serving as the raw material for scrimshaw, New England’s most distinctive folk art tradition, sperm whale ivory was not infrequently used in the nineteenth century as a substrate for human dentures.

Elsewhere, however, the teeth of Physeter macrocephalus played other roles. Here is the Pacific adventurer William Lockerby—an intrepid beachcomber and man of fortune on the cannibal island of Fiji—scribbling in his journal on the 16th of May, 1809:

I went about ten miles up the river Embagaba to a village where I was told there was a large lot of Sandlewood [sic]; but the owners wanted a large whale’s tooth for it, and I had not one to give.

Lockerby’s text offers one of the earliest references to the use of sperm whale teeth in Fiji as tabua—valuable exchange items, currency-like in their capacity to store value, secure trade, and symbolize wealth.

Were these tabua-teeth money? It turns out to be a philosophical question. But philosophy requires an armchair, and those were in short supply in that particular environment. The undernourished rapacity of tars-on-the-make militated against metaphysics. Even money-metaphysics. A calloused pragmatics of give-me-this (for-that/or-else/just-because) generally sufficed for their purposes. And so the many roughnecks working the archipelagoes of the Pacific in the China trade (pearls, bêche-de-mer, precious woods) and the boatloads of sailors dropping anchor for wood and water (and sometimes women) soon learned that one did well to bring along plenty of sperm whale teeth to Fiji, where, generally strung on a woven fiber strand, they seemed to function as the coin of the realm. Under the proper circumstances, a single tooth could “buy” a canoe, for instance, or a large and tasty pig (welcome fare for scurvy jacks). The same teeth could be used for other purposes as well—as blood money paid in compensation for one of those unfortunate deaths that were all too common on the beaches of the Pacific; as a bride-price for the transactional alliances by intermarriage that often preceded, and sometimes followed, such violence. Given the number of whaling vessels plying the South Pacific for sperm whales in those years, there was no shortage of tabua changing hands across the surf at Rewa or Lakeba—effecting a brisk trade in the sundries of sunstruck life.

Back in armchairs at the various colonial metropoleis, trickle-back accounts of the weird exchange systems at the margins of empire (cowrie shells, iron nails, red cloth, sperm whale teeth?) occasioned considerable, and not infrequently troubled, reflection on money—what it was, how it worked, and where it came from. It was one thing to comment condescendingly on the bizarre fact that Fijians seemed to treat a bit of cetaceous fang as more valuable than diamond, but quite another to begin to worry (goaded by the wry defamiliarizations of Karl Marx) that every Englishman was a fetish-worshiping primitive, beguiled by the smoke-and-mirror potency of the shilling, ever only a tinselly reflection/reification of his own sweat. Some distinctions were urgently in order.

The earliest efforts at a proper anthropology of money were born in this context. Some of these were little more than drawing room exercises, concerned primarily with colorful anecdoting as to the myriad exotic tokens of exchange in use among the savages (elk bones! wampum! mill stones!). But others worked hard, sifting experiences at the imperial periphery for clues about the kinds of creatures we are, and about the kinds of evolutionary/civilizational processes that had (presumably) led to the existence of something called an “economy”—a high-visibility and often distressing feature of life in Europe and America in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Take, for instance, R. C. Temple’s 1899 lecture to the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, “Beginnings of Currency,” in which the ramrod-backed British superintendent of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands dutifully reported his painstaking fieldwork trying to figure out the value of every domestic artifact in his jurisdiction in terms of coconuts—a project that led to the striking discovery that an eighth-of-a-rupee coin was valued at sixteen nuts, and a one-rupee coin at merely a hundred nuts! But the mutton-chopped colonel did not snicker at his subalterns. He drilled down, asked questions. The origin of the discrepancy lay, he ultimately decided, in the fact that the smaller coins were used in the making of one kind of body adornment, and the larger ones in another—and that the former sort of necklace-thingy was preferred. Nothing irrational there, he decided, and, working from this case study and others, he went on to offer a set of criteria for distinguishing money proper (abstract, metrically divisible, portable, not in itself useful for anything other than serving as a medium of exchange and/or a token of value) from mere “currencies” (like salt or rice or, say, coconuts) that could be used as all-purpose commensurators of value, but were themselves, in situ, actually useful/necessary to life. These marked, he argued, stages in the great upward marching parade of human development, which proceeded in the direction of greater abstraction. Debate followed (e.g., exactly how useless did something have to be to count as money? What about gold? What about an inedible chicken? etc.).

The broad consensus to emerge from this imperial era of money-think affirmed, on the basis of empirical observation, the basic tenet of the early conjectural histories of economic life to be found in the writings of John Locke and others: namely, that money arose out of barter; that it was a technical innovation for streamlining the primordial business of “trade-you-my-fish-for-your-whatever.” Such primitive quid pro quo-ing could become difficult if the parties could not arrive at a workable deal in whole units of their tradables, and so it stood to reason that clever savages might settle on a commensuration of their respective goods in terms of some third good—some token-like doodad of widely recognized, and ideally more-or-less fixed, value. Voilà—the first step on the long march to a truly abstracted unit-value for everything.