Banknotes, Hierarchy, and Legitimacy
Vilnius University
2026-06-12
[N]ot even love has made so many fools of men as the pondering over the nature of money.
– Gladstone (1845*) according to Marx (1904, 73)
Banknotes are (at least) three things:
Banknote iconography is a visual narrative of value.
Research on currency iconography has shown how banknotes project national identity, collective memory, state formation, design conventions, gender hierarchies, institutional quality, and conservation visibility (Hymans 2004; Penrose 2011; Lawson 2019; Fiori 2025; Newbery, Morrison, and Castley 2024).
A key debate is whether banknote iconographic choices respond to public opinion trends or if they instead are instruments by governments to shape them (state-as-pedagogue) (Helleiner 1998; Lauer 2008; Papadopoulos 2015).
Does the hierarchical nature of the monetary architecture leave traces on the symbolic surface of public money?
Does the symbolic composition of banknotes shift when issuers experience hard times?
Does the gendered symbolism of banknotes respond to political shifts?
The working dataset contains 4,275 banknotes from 151 issuing countries or entities, spanning 1900 to 2026.
Obverse and reverse images are treated separately, yielding 8,550 banknote side images.
The classified results currently cover 3,456 high confidence banknote side observations from 74 issuing countries or entities, spanning 1900 to 2025.
Classifications below 0.90 confidence are excluded from the preliminary results.
Geographic distribution of banknotes in the sample.
Banknote side observations in the working sample by decade and side.
The unit of analysis is the banknote side.
The model records visible content only. It does not infer national meaning, ideology, political intention, secularism, authoritarianism, modernization, or collective identity from an isolated image.
A visible portrait can be coded as a human figure and, when apparent, as male, female, mixed, or unknown. It is not coded as evidence of a political meaning.
| Analytic family | Visible motif variables | Main use |
|---|---|---|
| Persons | Human figures, portraits, apparent gender, collective figures, allegorical figures | Tracks who is placed on money and whether people appear as individual, collective, or symbolic subjects. |
| Authority and institutions | Buildings, monuments, heraldic symbols, religious symbols, official emblems | Captures visible signs of state, institutional, sacred, or monumental authority. |
| Territory and nature | Landscapes, water, plants, animals | Captures land, nature, territory, and non human symbolic life. |
| Modernity and infrastructure | Vehicles, machines, industrial or technological objects | Captures development, movement, production, and technical modernization. |
| Ornament and abstraction | Guilloche, borders, decorative engraving, abstract designs, ornamental only sides | Provides a contrast category for decorative or non representational design. |
Distribution of analytic motif families by side.
Gendered co-presence of authority and nature motifs.
| Comparison | Female | Male | Difference | p value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Female allegory versus authority marker | 166 of 404, 41.1 percent versus 72 of 404, 17.8 percent | Not used | 23.3 percentage points | <0.001 |
| Allegory among female versus male coded figures | 166 of 404, 41.1 percent | 59 of 1000, 5.9 percent | 35.2 percentage points | <0.001 |
| Authority marker among female versus male coded figures | 72 of 404, 17.8 percent | 201 of 1000, 20.1 percent | negative 2.3 percentage points | 0.371 |
1,196 obverse sides, or 67 percent, contain persons. The corresponding figure for reverses is 497 sides, or 30 percent.
Authority and institutional motifs are also more common on obverses, appearing on 71 percent of obverses and 65 percent of reverses.
Modernity and infrastructure are less common overall, appearing on 16 percent of reverse sides and 8 percent of obverses.
On obverses, territory and nature motifs appear with 63 percent of female coded figures and 44 percent of male coded figures. On reverses, the corresponding shares are 69 percent and 56 percent.
The front of the note tends to carry the more direct signs of authorization and hierarchy.
The reverse more often elaborates the territorial, developmental, scenic, or natural environment around that claim.
Female coded figures are more often accompanied by territory and nature motifs.
These results remain preliminary.
The classified corpus is incomplete, and the categories that require judgment, especially allegory, authority markers, and apparent gender, still require manual validation.
The final analysis needs to test whether the same patterns hold across regions, periods, denominations, and issuer types.
Manual validation of a stratified sample of banknote sides (app).
Category level reliability checks for ambiguous motifs (e.g. past/future).
Full principal component analysis (PCA) of symbolic variation over time.
Models linking representational roles to monetary hierarchy and broader political economy covariates.
Money functions as credit and as commoodity, but it also acts as symbol of value:
It is an impersonal claim within a social system.
It operates under the dual rationalist logics of efficiency and authority.
However, the intuitive logic of symbolism, of value and attention, should not be ignored.
