New World silver may not have caused Imperial Spain’s inflation

Science : Long thought to be the reason behind Spain’s crippling inflation in the 16th and 17th centuries, the massive amounts of silver shipped in from the Americas may not even have entered Spain’s currency until at least 100 years later, according to a study conducted by a group at the University of Lyon in France and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Anne-Marie DeSaulty and colleagues used mass spectrometry to measure the ratios of several metal isotopes in 91 old coins from ancient Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, 16th–18th century Spain, and Latin America, writes Sara Reardon for Science. The ratio of the silver-109 isotope to silver-107 was much higher in New World coins than in the European coins. That suggests that even though American silver arrived in Spain in 1550, the Spanish waited well over 100 years before using it for their own currency. DeSaulty believes instead that the Spanish probably used the imported silver for trade. Some people have questioned, however, whether her sample of coins was large enough to support her conclusions and whether the importation of all that silver could have caused the inflation even if it weren’t minted into coins.