Citation needed?
Humans have been using credit systems for millennia. The implication that in the olden days people only walked around with bits of gold in their pockets is a bit of “retconning.”
Humans have been using credit systems for millennia. The implication that in the olden days people only walked around with bits of gold in their pockets is a bit of “retconning.”
This article includes some interesting tidbits: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/05/the-invention-...
Paper currency is a couple millenia older than the printing press, using woodlblock printing.
If we're talking specifically about credit cards, the credit card went from new invention to ubiquity in a couple of decades. But I think that's too narrow a scope to look at, to be honest.
Early credit systems did not depend upon the printing press; think of the widespread use of tally sticks in medieval Europe to enable illiterate low-technology credit systems.
It's really hard to approach this anthropologically, IMO, because so many other variables change. Less complex economies do fine with "local communism" and person-to-person debt, but it's hard to imagine using such a thing to order from Amazon. Conversely, coinage historically was useful if you had to exchange with someone with whom you didn't have a personal relationship (say, you're traveling to a faraway land and you can't just provide an IOU), but that's somewhat obsolete now.
I guess my conclusion would be that these historical analogies don't shed a lot of light.