Tracking the roots of money is a daunting, perhaps impossible, task. These books are a good place to start
Felix Martin’s pacy biography of money is a polemic told through history, rather than a dry chronology. Written in the shadow of the 2007-08 financial crisis and the euro-zone debt crisis, Mr Martin sets out to show that the commonly held view of money as a “thing”, such as a lump of metal or a coin, is wrong-headed. Starting with the giant stone money of the island of Yap, he demonstrates that it is more like a shared language or social contract.
Written in the 1950s but only translated into English in 1993, Xinwei’s two-volume history of money in China covers nearly 3,000 years, starting with the cowrie-shell currencies of the Zhou period and ending with the silver dollars and foreign banks of pre-revolutionary China. Fascinating in its own right, the work offers a corrective against the idea that there was a single way for money to develop: China developed fiat money nearly a millennium before Europe would do so.
Cowrie shells, the smooth white home of a mollusc, have the claim to be the world’s first global money: harvested in the Maldives, sold in Bengal, shipped to Europe and used to buy slaves in west Africa. The shells would also make the journey across the Atlantic: one was found in Thomas Jefferson’s estate; large quantities were discovered near to slave markets in Virginia and some are still used today by Afro-Brazilians to tell fortunes.
Barry Eichengreen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, tells the tale of various attempts over the past two centuries to create an international monetary system. The book starts in the era of the classic gold standard, when the leading economies of the time pegged their currencies to gold, before telling the tale of its disintegration between the first and second world wars.
A professor of sociology at Princeton University, Viviana Zelizer hones in on America between 1870 and 1930 to tell a social history of money. Examining magazine articles , court cases and much else, she shows how money assumes many different meanings. Couples would decide which bit of their finances was “his” and which was “hers”—and what each was entitled or required to spend it on. Ms Zelizer’s work provides a challenge to economists who tend to see money as fungible and utilitarian.
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