How the French Revolution created the Pound Sterling
Published in
5 min readAug 28, 2022
The French Revolution and the wars it spawned upset everything in Europe, including the financial system. In fact, the French Revolution led to the rise of the world’s first global reserve currency, the British pound sterling.
Until the American Revolution, the Dutch Guilder had been Europe’s reserve currency. However, the wars triggered by the American Revolution and revolutionary upheavals in the Netherlands destroyed the guilder and Amsterdam’s financial markets in 1780s.
