A TALK WITH PETER FAY We will travel back in time to colonial New England and New York to closely examine Marx’s views on money at the periphery of the British empire. Scarcity of British currency forced many commodities toward the role of “universal equivalent”: Indian corn, tobacco, pieces of eight. But it was colonial thirst for luxury commodities like beaver pelts that finally drove an explosive growth in the one money-commodity facilitating that trade: wampum.