The latest issue of Bloomberg has this piece I thought interesting, in an article titled “Grandma’s Gold Necklace is India’s Retirement Plan”
Indian households own about 25,000 tons of gold, roughly five times what’s stored in the US depository in Fort Knox.
The love of gold, and the use in dowries and other things (jewelry!) in India is historic dating back centuries, perhaps millenia. It’s so spread out that it brings no wealth to the country in the way we think about it; it doesn’t back the rupee, for example, although there are myriad shops which will loan against it for people in temporary need. The Pawn Shop trade we would call it here, although the article intimates that it’s a higher calling there.
Anyway, lotsa gold, just not in bricks, bars, or coins. Never knew they had it in those kinds of quantities.
I cannot remember which great historian of world trade wrote it, but he said something like:
The 16th to 18th centuries were dominated by digging up gold and silver in the Americas, transferring same to Europe and then to India and China, who buried the gold and silver in graves and doweries.
Sounds like Fernand Braudel, who was popular when I was in college.
His volumes The Wheels of Commerce (part of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century) and The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II detail how Spain and Portugal extracted gold and silver from their American colonies, which was then funneled into European trade and subsequently used to purchase Asian goods. Much of this silver ended up in China due to its tax system requiring payments in silver, and in India, where it was used for dowries and buried as family wealth.