We specialize in hard to find items
(1)
Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism
Share Tweet
*Price and Stocks may change without prior notice
*Packaging of actual item may differ from photo shown
- Electrical items MAY be 110 volts.
- 7 Day Return Policy
- All products are genuine and original
About Making Money: Coin, Currency, And The Coming Of
Product Description Money travels the modern world in disguise. It looks like a convention of human exchange - a commodity like gold or a medium like language. But its history reveals that money is a very different matter. It is an institution engineered by political communities to mark and mobilize resources. As societies change the way they create money, they change the market itself - along with the rules that structure it, the politics and ideas that shape it, and the benefits that flow from it. One particularly dramatic transformation in money's design brought capitalism to England. For centuries, the English government monopolized money's creation. The Crown sold people coin for a fee in exchange for silver and gold. 'Commodity money' was a fragile and difficult medium; the first half of the book considers the kinds of exchange and credit it invited, as well as the politics it engendered. Capitalism arrived when the English reinvented money at the end of the 17th century. When it established the Bank of England, the government shared its monopoly over money creation for the first time with private investors, institutionalizing their self-interest as the pump that would produce the money supply. The second half of the book considers the monetary revolution that brought unprecedented possibilities and problems. The invention of circulating public debt, the breakdown of commodity money, the rise of commercial bank currency, and the coalescence of ideological commitments that came to be identified with the Gold Standard - all contributed to the abundant and unstable medium that is modern money. All flowed as well from a collision between the individual incentives and public claims at the heart of the system. The drama had constitutional dimension: money, as its history reveals, is a mode of governance in a material world. That character undermines claims in economics about money's neutrality. The monetary design innovated in England would later spread, producing the global architecture of modern money. Review "The book is a great read, a page turner for economics mavens and maybe an epiphany for those who have not considered where their money comes from." - Andrew Allentuck, Financial Post "Ms Desan displays exemplary scholarship in detailing money's origins...her study is worth the effort." - The Economist "[In this book] A constitutional historian dives deep into the political economy of money in Englandfrom royal monopoly to joint creation with private investorsto illuminate how the means of exchange is in fact a form of governance and of social order." - Harvard Magazine " Making Money will undoubtedly become an exemplary text in its field. It has a lot to offer... In sum, this book is of tremendous value and a notable text in legal history and within those subjects at the peripheries surrounding it. It sets a new path in challenging our ways of studying commercial law and viewing money and currency as a purely economic tool and as a mechanism of exchange." - Victoria Barnes, The Journal of Legal History "[T]hose interested in gaining a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of money . . . Will find this book invaluable. [Desan's] approach . . . Is essentially a new history and analysis of how money is made." - Ms Katie Ball, Worcester College, Oxford, Reviews in History " Making Money contributes to . . . understanding [the popularity of cash] by providing a detailed and insightful narrative of how cash developed into the 'killer app' of payment technologies." -William Roberds, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Journal of Economic Literature "Christine Desan's Making Money should be amongst the points of departure for analysis and reflection not beholden to the existing institutional structures and the interests served by such institutions...This insight elevates Desan's book far above the kind of literature that cultivates a generalizing view of money, its current forms, and institutional settings as
