With widespread homologizing power I mean a power structure across cultures assimilating these to something new, unified. Typically empires.
I think the only thing we don’t agree on is our interpretation on how societal abstractions arise. You seem to champion the bottom up approach. I’m suggesting the bottom up always leads to top down. Both are needed i guess.
If you were right there would have been barter societies that made the rise of money necessary. But there was no such thing. No barter societies to be found.
Money was almost always a thing of empires because that’s what empires do: abstracting, standardizing, co-integrating and scaling the cultural patterns they find.
