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Making Money - Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Hardcover)
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Making Money - Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Hardcover)
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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.
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