Larkfield - what is confusing in this case is that the terminology is the same for the product and the currency.
As for relative values of silver and purchasing power of the currency, that is really difficult to establish as it depends on various factors. One of these is the change from what was termed "representative money" to "fiat currency".
Representative money applied to the early value of the
£ as being one (troy) pound of sterling silver; assume that you had a bank note with a denomination of
£ 1- you could take it to the bank and demand that you be given one (troy)pound of silver.
Fiat currency is assigned a value by fiat - the government decrees that
£ 1 is worth x% of US$1 or whatever else it chooses to use. You no longer can demand the equivalent value in silver. US bank notes used to say"entitles the bearer on demand" and when the gold standard still applied it was theoretically (but not actually) possible to demand that a bank give you the equivalent value in gold (set in 1873: United States de facto at $20.67 to one troy ounce gold). The value of gold, once uncoupled from the currency, rose to ridiculous heights above $800 in the 1970s - partly in reaction to the oil crisis. Theoretically, one would have been able to lay down $35.00(adjusted after WWII under Bretton Woods), and walk away with one ounce of gold - worth $800! LOL
Example: in the 1970s, the notorious Hunt brothers of Texas decided to corner the silver market. Through illegal dealing they succeeded in driving the price of silver up to $50+ per ounce. Many antique items were melted down; production of new flatware, holloware and jewelry, as well as black and white film, fell drastically as its price rose. If you looked at that time period you would see a huge distortion of the historical value of silver.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,920875,00.htmlHad the UK still used representative currency at that time, one would have been able to demand one (troy) pound of silver @$54/ounce. Not that you would have got it!
Laughlin, J. Laurence,
The History of Bimetallism in the United States , D. Appleton and Co., New York, Fourth edition, 1898,
http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Laughlin/lghHBM13.html has information as well as a chart that shows the steep decline in the value of silver in the late 19th C., due to the opening of silver mines in other parts of the world. Without going to a specialist library it is fairly difficult to find such information.
Tom - the concept of silver as a way of banking one's wealth has been a broadly-held idea only in its recent history. Silver, gold, glass, lace and all those other unnecessary
objets were - until the mid- to late-Victorian Era - for the very rich, only.
Though I think in the Colonies, silversmiths were happy to oblige many people's aspiration to own a piece or two of silver - which may account for the relative thinness of so much American ware.
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