So you want to understand finance?
Start with cloth.

In ancient Mesopotamia, Sumerian temple economies paid workers in textiles. In Inca society, textiles functioned as tax and data. In West Africa, woven strip cloths like kente and aso oke were currencies. In Medieval Europe, before the banking system matured, wool financed wars. Under colonial systems, textiles were used as currency for human lives.

With woven goods, economies have counted, stored, and transferred value for thousands of years. They weren’t accessories to the economy. They were the economic system: labor, value, storage, transfer.

With fibered infrastructure, humans learned to manipulate material at scale, create complex patterns, execute precise measurements, build flexible but durable structures, develop mass production techniques, establish trade networks, create standardized units of value.

The fact that we also use them for warmth, beauty, status, and carrying stuff, those are applications of the technology, not the technology itself.

This series traces how textiles have shaped and structured financial systems... and what that means now, when factory floors live on laptops and ERC-20 (++) tokens move through decentralized ledgers to coordinate machines.