Plurk paste

ENDNOTES
INTRODUCTION 1. This quote was unearthed by economists Michael V. White and Kurth Schuler in “Retrospectives: Who Said ‘Debauch the Currency’: Keynes or Lenin?,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 23, no. 2, spring 2009, pp. 213–22.
2. Lawrence Malkin, Krueger’s Men: The Secret Nazi Counterfeit Plot and the Prisoners of Block 19, New York: Little, Brown, 2006, p. 177.
3. Ibid., p. 62.
4. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017, chapter 1.
2: BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON 1. It is also possible that Kushim was not an individual—Kushim might have referred to an institution or group of administrators. For more on Kushim, see Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, London: Vintage, 2014, pp. 138–40.
2. Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, London: Allen Lane, 2022, p. 10.
3. Graeber, p. 216.
4. Ibid., p. 39.
5. Ibid., p. 214.
6. Reuven Yaron, The Laws of Eshnunna, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1988, p. 20.
7. Aziz Emmanuel al-Zebari, “Shekels: An Ancient Currency,” Ishtar TV (August 11, 2011).
8. English Standard Version Bible, Proverbs 11:1.
9. William N. Goetzmann, Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, pp. 37–40.
10. For a more detailed analysis of the Drehem tablet, see the fascinating account in chapter 2 of Goetzmann.
3: FROM CONTRACTS TO COINS 1. This famous myth is brilliantly retold by Stephen Fry, Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold, London: Michael Joseph, 2017, pp. 384–95.
2. Peter L. Bernstein, The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000, p. 27.
3. Ibid., p. 28.
4. Ibid.
5. For more on this, see Jack Weatherford, The History of Money: From Sandstone to Cyberspace, New York: Crown Publications, 1997, pp. 30–31.
6. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944, chapter 4.
7. For more on the social impact of universal value, see Felix Martin, Money: The Unauthorised Biography, London: Vintage, 2015, chapter 3.
8. Herodotus, The Histories, New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004, book I.94.
9. Ibid.
10. Bernstein, p. 30.
11. This time frame is generally accepted among scholars according to Susanne Berndt-Ersöz, “The Chronology and Historical Context of Midas,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, vol. 57, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–37.
12. Bronze Age experts might argue that the Phoenicians have equal claim to being the first commercial empire. 13. For more on this, see Bernstein, chapter 2.
4: MONEY AND THE GREEK MIND 1. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, book 2, pp. 47–8.
2. Ivana Marková, The Dialogical Mind: Common Sense and Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016; William Keith Chambers Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy: Volume 2, The Presocratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965; Robert L. Fowler, “Mythos and Logos,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 131, 2011, pp. 45–66.
3. For a lively discussion on the difference between Homer and Xenophon, see Weatherford, chapter 2.
4. Goetzmann, p. 73.
5. James Watson, “The Origin of Metic Status at Athens,” Cambridge Classical Journal, vol.
56, 2010, p. 262.
6. James M. Redfield, “The Development of the Market in Archaic Greece” in A. J. H.
Latham and B. L. Anderson (eds.), The Market in History (Routledge Revivals), London: Routledge, 1986, pp. 45–6.
7. Goetzmann, p. 96.
8. Ibid., p. 87.
9. Weatherford, p. 38 fleshes out this point convincingly.
10. Xenophon, Oeconomicus, III, x.
11. Ibid., III.xiv.
12. Diogenes Laertius, book 9: 50–53.
13. See more on the origins of the word democracy in Raphael Sealey, “The Origins of ‘Demokratia,’” California Studies in Classical Antiquity, vol. 6, 1973, pp. 253–95.
14. Alain Bresson, The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets, and Growth in the City-States, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, part IV.
15. Quoted in ibid., p. 109.
16. Socrates, in Plato, Phaedo, 109b.
17. Athenaios, Deipnosophistai 14.640b–c, quoted in Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention, London: Jonathan Cape, 2020, chapter 3.
18. For more on Socrates and the agora, see Wilson, chapter 3.
19. Bresson, p. 104.
20. François de Callataÿ, “Money and Its Ideas: State Control and Military Expenses,” in Stefan Krmnicek (ed.), A Cultural History of Money in Antiquity, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., p. 60.
OceanofPDF.com 5: THE EMPIRE OF CREDIT 1. Robert I. Curtis, “Archaeological Evidence for Economic Life at Pompeii: A Survey,” Classical Outlook, vol. 57, no. 5, 1980, pp. 98–102.
2. Ibid.
3. Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturae, 12.41. “At the very lowest computation, India, the Seres, and the Arabian Peninsula, withdraw from our empire one hundred millions of sesterces every year—so dearly do we pay for our luxury and our women. How large a portion, too, I should like to know, of all these perfumes, really comes to the gods of heaven, and the deities of the shades below?” 4. Miko Flohr and Andrew Wilson, “The Economy of Pompeii” in Miko Flohr and Andrew Wilson (eds.), The Economy of Pompeii (Oxford Studies on the Roman Economy), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 452.
5. Duncan E. MacRae, “Mercury and Materialism: Images of Mercury and the Tabernae of Pompeii,” in John F. Miller and Jenny Strauss Clay (eds.), Tracking Hermes, Pursuing Mercury, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 403.
6. Written on the tombstone of former slave Tiberius Claudius Secundus, quoted in Brian K.
Harvey, Daily Life in Ancient Rome: A Sourcebook, Indianapolis: Focus, p. 256.
7. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis, 1.151.
8. Quoted in Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, p. 5.
9. More on this in chapter 20.
10. Goetzmann, p. 132.
11. For more on this, see Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
OceanofPDF.com 6: TWILIGHT OF THE FEUDAL ECONOMY 1. For more detail on this, see Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
2. Ibid., pp. 9–14.
3. Bernstein, chapter 3.
4. Bernstein, p. 86.
5. Recent studies using Danish data indicate that the introduction of the plow “accounts for more than 40 percent of the increase in urbanisation experienced in the High Middle Ages in Denmark in particular and 15.7% in Europe more generally”: Thomas Barnebeck Andersen, Peter Sandholt Jensen, and Christian Volmar Skovsgaard, “The Heavy Plow and the Agricultural Revolution in Medieval Europe,” EHES Working Papers in Economic History, no.
70, 2014.
6. Spufford, chapter 5.
7. For more on these developments, see ibid.
8. Ibid.
OceanofPDF.com 7: SARACEN MAGIC 1. Bartel L. van der Waerden, A History of Algebra: From al-Khwārizmī to Emmy Noether, Berlin: Springer, 2013, first published 1985.
2. Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
3. Timothy James Smit, “Commerce and Coexistence: Muslims in the Economy and Society of Norman Sicily,” PhD dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota, 2009, chapter 1.
4. For more on Fibonacci, see Goetzmann, chapter 13, and Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, London: Penguin Press, 2008, chapter 1.
8: DARKNESS INTO LIGHT 1. For more on Dante, there is plenty of material out there but I recommend Ian Thomson’s brilliant, lively, and informative account with some fine illustrations and literary references: Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Journey Without End, London: Apollo, 2018.
2. Christopher Hibbert, Florence: The Biography of a City, London: Penguin, 1993, pp. 50– 51.
3. Ibid. 4. For more on early European innovation, see David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, New York: Abacus Press, 1998, pp.
45–59.
5. Thomson, p. 59.
6. Hibbert, pp. 50–51.
7. The currency wasn’t entirely free-floating. The Florentines tried to manage the value of the florin to keep it stable. These days, such activities are known as central bank open market operations, whereby the central bank of the country with the powerful currency sells its own currency to moderate its value. Despite the Florentines’ efforts, relentless demand for the florin pushed its value up over time.
8. Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato: Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City, London: Penguin, 2017, p. 69.
9. If you would like to read more about horizontal and vertical hierarchies, I recommend Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower: History’s Hidden Networks, London: Allen Lane, 2017.
9: GOD’S PRINTER 1. Quoted in “Pope Pius II’s Scotland Visit in 1435 Explored,” The National. The quote originates from Pope Pius II’s 13-volume autobiography, Commentaries.
2. Neil MacGregor, Germany: Memories of a Nation, London: Allen Lane, 2014, chapter 16.
3. Ibid., p. 290.
4. For more on Gutenberg’s press, see Fran Rees, Johannes Gutenberg: Inventor of the Printing Press, Minneapolis: Compass Point, 2006.
5. Ibid.
6. Jeremiah Dittmar, “Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of The Printing Press,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 126, no. 3, 2011, pp. 1133–72.
7. Ibid.
8. Brendan Greeley, The Almighty Dollar, Penguin Random House, forthcoming.
9. Jared Rubin, “Printing and Protestants: An Empirical Test of the Role of Printing in the Reformation,” Review of Economics and Statistics, vol. 96, issue 2, 2014, pp. 270–86.
10. Ibid.
11. Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 98.
12. Bernstein, p. 135.
OceanofPDF.com 10: INVISIBLE MONEY 1. Daniel Brook, A History of Future Cities, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2013, chapter 1.
2. Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613–1918, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017.
3. Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost, pp. 14–20.
4. Peter M. Garber, Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2001, p. 83.
5. Ibid.
11: THE FATHER OF MONETARY ECONOMICS 1. Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 295–6, first published 1954.
2. Antoin E. Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 33.
3. Antoin E. Murphy (ed.), John Law’s “Essay on a Land Bank,” Dublin: Eon, 1994.
4. Martin, p. 172. 5. Suzanne Vesta Kooloos, “Magic Lanterns and Raree Shows: Metaphors of Financial Speculation During the Bubbles of 1720,” Early Popular Visual Culture, vol. 20, no. 4, 2022, pp. 368–87.
6. Murphy, John Law, p. 303.
OceanofPDF.com 12: THE BISHOP OF MONEY 1. For more on Talleyrand, read Duff Cooper, Talleyrand, London: Vintage, 2010, first published 1932.
2. Andrew Dickson White, Fiat Money Inflation in France, New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1933, p. 59.
3. Alexandre Tuetey, Publications relatives à la Révolution française. Répertoire général des sources manuscrites de l’histoire de Paris pendant la Révolution française, 11 volumes, Paris: Commission des travaux historiques de la Ville de Paris, 1890–1914, vol. IV, preface.
4. Bruce Berkowitz, Playfair: The True Story of the British Secret Agent Who Changed How We See the World, Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 2018, preface.
OceanofPDF.com 13: MONEY AND THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 1. For more on Talleyrand’s time in the US, see Hans Huth and Wilma Pugh (ed. & trans.), Talleyrand in America as a Financial Promoter, 1794–96: Unpublished Letters and Memoirs, New York: Da Capo Press, 1971, first published 1942.
2. Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, New York: Penguin Press, 2004, p. 466.
3. Cooper, p. 270.
4. Chernow, p. 720.
5. Ibid., chapter 11.
6. Ibid., chapter 26.
7. Robert Nisbet, “Many Tocquevilles,” American Scholar, vol. 46, no. 1, 1977, pp. 59–75.
8. Ferguson, The Ascent of Money, p. 20.
9. Weatherford, p. 119.
10. Alexander Hamilton, Report Relative to a Provision for the Support of Public Credit, Treasury Department, January 9, 1790.
11. Chernow, chapter 15.
12. Chernow, p. 466.
13. For more on the legacy of Hamilton, see Robert Scylla, Robert E. Wright, and David J.
Cowen, “Alexander Hamilton, Central Banker: Crisis Management During the US Financial Panic of 1792,” Business History Review, vol. 83, no. 1, A Special Issue on Scandals and Panics, 2009, pp. 61–86.
14. Alexis de Tocqueville, Selected Letters on Politics and Society, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, p. 39.
OceanofPDF.com 14: EMPIRICISM AND THE EVOLUTIONARY ECONOMY 1. Joseph Roth, Weights and Measures, London: Penguin Books, 2017.
2. The idea of decimalization had been championed by the Russians as early as the 1550s.
However, as Russia was seen as backward, enlightened American patriots couldn’t be seen to be borrowing from Moscow or deploying the Russian term “kopecks.” 3. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed—before Darwin—the idea that species evolved, but Darwin came up with the theory of natural selection and the idea that we all have a common ancestor.
4. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, London: Macmillan, 1890, p. xiv.
5. For more on the perils of the overconfident forecaster, read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (London: Allen Lane, 2007), and Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (London: Penguin, 2012). Both books are classics packed with humorous anecdotes and a large dollop of wisdom. 15: MONEY ON TRIAL 1. Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, New York: Vintage, 2011, chapter 7.
2. U.S. Patent Activity, Calendar Years 1790 to the Present, Table of Annual U.S. Patent Activity since 1970, n.d., https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/h_counts.htm, accessed January 20, 2024.
3. Albert Fishlow, “Lessons from the Past: Capital Markets During the 19th Century and the Interwar Period,” International Organization, vol. 39, no. 3, 1985, pp. 383–439.
4. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, London: Macmillan, 1999, p. 92.
5. Félicien Cattier, Étude sur la situation de l’État indépendant du Congo, Brussels, Larcier, 1906, p. 193; Robert Harms, “The World Abir Made: The Maringa-Lopori Basin, 1885–1903,” African Economic History, no. 12, 1983, pp. 125–39.
6. Harms.
7. Ibid.
8. Hochschild, p. 199.
9. Ward to Morel, 1903, quoted on p. 103 of William Roger Louis, “Roger Casement and the Congo,” The Journal of African History, vol. 5, no. 1, 1964, pp. 99–120.
10. Ibid., p. 109.
11. Ibid., p. 114.
12. Ibid., p. 115.
13. Brian Inglis, Roger Casement, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973, p. 346.
14. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, London: Wellred Books, 2019, first published 1916.
OceanofPDF.com 16: YELLOW BRICK ROAD 1. For more on the rise of American populism, see Thomas Frank, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020.
2. Weatherford, pp. 172–3.
3. R. H. Hooker, “Farm Prices of Wheat and Maize in America, 1870–99,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. 63, no. 4, 1900, pp. 648–57.
4. Politically, a similar dynamic unfolded in the early twenty-first century. After the 2008 global financial crisis, a catastrophe caused almost exclusively by the overlending of bankers, many Western governments reacted with austerity, squeezing the living standards of those at the bottom who had nothing to do with the mess made by those at the top, leading to an explosion of populist and nativist political parties, ideas, and movements.
Centrist governments pitted the “left behinds” against the “out of touch,” with populist results.
5. For more on this Populist movement, see Frank.
OceanofPDF.com 17: MODERNIST MONEY 1. For more on Joyce in Trieste, see The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904–1920 by John McCourt, to whom I am indebted for his insights, particularly about Joyce’s link to Baron Revoltella and Marx in Trieste. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000.
2. For more on early financial journalism, see Goetzmann, chapter 23.
3. Ibid., p. 410.
4. For more on the mixed ethnicity of Trieste, see McCourt.
5. Karl Marx, “The Maritime Commerce of Austria,” https://marxengels.publicarchive.net/en/ME0988en.html, accessed January 20, 2024.
6. U.S. Patent Activity, https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/h_counts.htm, accessed January 20, 2024. 7. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New York: Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 300.
8. McCourt, p. 142.
9. Ellmann, p. 303.
10. To mangle Gramsci!
11. John Collison, @collision, Twitter, May 25, 2022.
12. For more on the link between bourgeois societies and economic vitality, see Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
13. As Deirdre McCloskey has observed in Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), it is a mistake to simply count the number of innovators in a given society, and this mistake has misdirected the academic study of entrepreneurship away from sociology and toward psychology.
14. As McCloskey argues in Bourgeois Dignity and further demonstrates in Bourgeois Equality, “values like acceptance, dignity, hope and even love drive commercial activity.” 15.
For a brilliant exploration of prewar Vienna, see Florian Illies, 1913: The Year Before the Storm, London: Clerkenwell Press, 2014.
OceanofPDF.com 18: INTO THE ABYSS 1. Adam Fergusson, When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyperinflation, London: William Kimber & Co, 1975, p. 87.
2. Ibid., p. 88.
3. Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, London: William Heinemann, 2009, p. 130.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. For more on the German Genius, see Peter Watson, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century, New York: HarperCollins, 2010.
8. For an excellent read on this period of German history, see Mark Jones, 1923: The Forgotten Crisis in the Year of Hitler’s Coup, London: Basic Books, 2023.
9. Ibid.
10. This is very well explained by Mark Jones in 1923.
11. Quoted in J. Hoberman, “An Evil Doctor Who Casts a Spell on Subjects and Viewers Alike,” New York Times, May 6, 2020.
12. Gerald D. Feldman, The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
13. Richard Radford, “The Economic Organisation of a POW Camp,” Economica, November 1945.
14. For more on this counterfeiting operation, see Malkin.
OceanofPDF.com 19: WHO CONTROLS MONEY?
1. Oded Galor, The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality, London: Vintage, 2023, chapter 7.
2. Iñaki Aldasoro and Torsten Ehlers, “The Geography of Dollar Funding of Non-US Banks,” BIS Quarterly Review, December 2018.
OceanofPDF.com 20: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MONEY 1. These terms, “hedge,” “speculative,” and “Ponzi borrower,” were coined by the economist Hyman Minsky.
21: THE EVOLUTION OF MONEY 1. Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., 2023.
2. Matt Cooke, “Driven by Purpose: 15 Years of M-Pesa’s Evolution,” McKinsey & Company, June 29, 2022.
A NOTE ON FURTHER READING Dear Reader, If you’ve got this far it means I’ve struck some sort of chord. Thanks so much for your time and your attention; I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride. The topic of money’s central role in the development of our civilization has fascinated me for many years, and any authority I might claim to have stems from working in the field of monetary economics and reading the work of experts. Much of what I read shaped the main arguments of this book, and sometimes my reading led me down little tributaries that could be equally as fascinating.
Here I’ll give you some notes on my sources, which you will hopefully find helpful if you want to research further into any of the subjects I’ve covered.
And if not, who knows, you might simply find yourself with a spare moment, rummaging enjoyably through one of the following books.
I’ll set the reading material out in chronological order, chapter by chapter, but before that, I should say that one book that influenced my thinking throughout the enterprise was The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What It Means for Business and Society by Eric D.
Beinhocker, which looks at the economy as a complex system and sees wealth creation as an evolutionary process. This line of discussion crystalized what I’d been thinking for many years—that the economy is a dynamic, never static, always-on system. More important for our purposes, it got me thinking about money as a social technology that played a key role in the evolution of human society. If you are looking for an eye-opener, Beinhocker is well worth a few hours of your concentration.
Chapter 1 owes much of its flavor to Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott, a wonderful book that outlines, among other things, the central role of fire as a technology in human development. This framework helped my thinking about money as a similarly critical technology. More than that, it gave me a sense of the great sweep of ancient history— prehistoric history, if you will—and the role of economics before economics was invented. No perspective on ancient money, debt, and contracts is complete without reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, whose sections on debt in Druidic Ireland fascinated me. While not making it into the end text, this scholarly work was essential in my early reading for the sense it gave me of deep economic history.
My main companion in chapter 2 was Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann. Detailed, dense, and delightful, Goetzmann’s book was with me throughout the project generally, and his sections on Sumerian money are outstanding.
Understanding the critical role of the rate of interest allowed me to dig a bit deeper in this chapter and my essential guide was the excellent The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor. Like everything Chancellor writes, this book is a pleasure from start to finish, and it gets us thinking about the rate of interest in ways that I’m sure most of us rarely do.
Once I got to the Lydians and Greeks in chapters 3 and 4, Peter L. Bernstein’s wonderful The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession, so brilliantly written and such fun to browse, was enormously incisive. Another book that steered me through the economics of Midas, Xenophon, and Co. is a real gem written by American anthropologist Jack Weatherford, The History of Money. For the noneconomist, this is a gripping read, as it wrestles the story of money from my economist tribe’s narrow focus and broadens it, giving it anthropological heft. Meanwhile, money’s essential urbanness was reinforced to me by Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention by Ben Wilson. If urbanism is your thing, this is one for you. Regarding the Romans and credit crises, my views were sharpened by Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises by Charles P.
Kindleberger, a classic, pure and simple. In fact, on the issues of money, debt, and cycles, anything by Kindleberger will reward. On the end of the Roman Empire, Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel is a brilliant source, as is his The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, on the persistence of inequality.
When I moved ahead to the medieval era and the pivotal introduction of Hindu-Arabic numerals and zero into Europe, a little gem of a book helped me enormously. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife tells the story of how zero unlocked the power of mathematics in early fourteenth-century Europe, after centuries in the relative darkness of Greek and then Roman rudimentary counting. For Dante’s Florence, as well as The Divine Comedy itself, a wonderful friend was Ian Thomson’s Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Journey Without End, a beautifully concise study of the literature, life, politics, and intrigue of Florence in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It you want to go deeper into the life of the emerging merchant class of the period, The Merchant of Prato: Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City by Iris Origo is an indispensable guide, and to get a feel for the pre-Renaissance world, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt is obligatory. Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power on the power of networks wasn’t ever far away in these chapters on the networks of the merchants, and it was particularly useful in examining the impact of Gutenberg’s printing press.
As we move into the section called “Revolutionary Money,” my thinking has been influenced by the writings of Deirdre McCloskey and in particular her vital trilogy on bourgeois values.
The first book in the series, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World, opened my mind to an entirely new way of looking at the intersection between economics, culture, and, believe it or not, social manners, and gave me a plausible basis from which to examine the role of money from the seventeenth century onward. I’m also greatly indebted to the work of my old monetary economics professor and the biographer of John Law, Professor Antoin E. Murphy of Trinity College Dublin. His thoughts are particularly well laid out in John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker. Antoin’s guidance on chapters 11, 12 and 13 on Law, Talleyrand, and Hamilton was indispensable.
For chapter 14 on Darwin and the evolutionary economy, my inspirations were Beinhocker’s The Origin of Wealth and The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by the evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich.
Henrich outlines how culture evolves and this triggered my thinking about money being a cultural concept as well as a financial notion. Chapter 15 was the product of lots of foraging from all over the place, but when things seemed a bit overwhelming—as they can during the writing of a big book— daily strolls down the road to the statue of Roger Casement in Dún Laoghaire invigorated me. If inanimate art has a role in kick-starting the efforts of the writer, this is a great example. Next time you are out this way, south of Dublin city, Casement’s statue is worth a visit. “Yellow Brick Road” and my thoughts about the role of money in the 1896 American presidential election were greatly enhanced by The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism by Thomas Frank. Its description of nineteenth-century populism rescues this mass liberation movement from the current shorthand that regards populism as in some way atavistic. Frank reframes this movement and our understanding of the power of money and currency.
Chapter 17 features James Joyce. Ulysses was a joy to discover properly. I say properly because many Dubliners pretend to have read it, and this project forced me to actually do so, with bountiful rewards. Also essential reading for this chapter was Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living, as was Richard Ellmann’s biography James Joyce, and for details on Trieste, John McCourt’s The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904–1920 was invaluable; it kept me focused on central Europe, its culture, its economy, and its money. I read Adam Fergusson’s When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyperinflation a long time ago and came back to it for chapter 18. This book and Mark Jones’s 1923: The Forgotten Crisis in the Year of Hitler’s Coup offer wonderful background on the monetary chaos of Weimar, while Hitler’s great forgery is brilliantly documented in The Devil’s Workshop: A Memoir of the Nazi Counterfeiting Operation by Adolf Burger.
All through the months of writing, two books that share the title of this one, Money by Eric Lonergan and Money: The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin, were constantly open, and are now full of scribbled notes in their margins. Both will pay your time back in spades.
The full reading list is far more comprehensive than this inventory, but I hope drawing your attention to a few of these books that helped me will also help you.
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7. North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy Stock Photo.
8. The Unique Maps Co.; Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images; Trustees of the British Museum.
9. Imago/Kharbine Tapabor; Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo.
10. Zoom Historical/Alamy Stock Image; Steve Stock/Alamy Stock Image; Everett Collection/Shutterstock.
11. World History Archive/Alamy; Painters/Alamy Stock Photo. 12. Punch; Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo.
13. ARCHIVIO GBB/Alamy Stock Photo; Penta Spring Limited/Alamy Stock Photo.
14. World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo; Albert Harlingue/Roger Viollet via Getty Images.
15. © 2024 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by DACS, London/Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images; Martin Lubikowski.
16. instagram.com/kimkardashian; Bloomberg/Getty Images.