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The Enlightenment was a time of monetary turmoil and transformation
in Europe. Change began with a riot of experimentation, including
novel ideas about human agency and capacity to promote economic
progress, efforts to reframe divinity in terms (like the
providential) compatible with market exchange, new instruments of
credit, and innovative institutions such as national banks and
capital markets. Europeans, including the settler societies in
North America, improvised frantically: people faced the task of
everyday exchange in changing media; governments took up the
project of creating currencies that supported their political
power; artists and writers raced to represent new forms of wealth
and interpret the issues they raised; and intellectuals struggled
to conceptualize, and tame, patterns of monetary transformation.
The result was a rich debate, still unsettled, about the sources of
value, the morality of the market, and the very nature of money.
Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural
History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment presents essays that
examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of
technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and
representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.
The Enlightenment was a time of monetary turmoil and transformation
in Europe. Change began with a riot of experimentation, including
novel ideas about human agency and capacity to promote economic
progress, efforts to reframe divinity in terms (like the
providential) compatible with market exchange, new instruments of
credit, and innovative institutions such as national banks and
capital markets. Europeans, including the settler societies in
North America, improvised frantically: people faced the task of
everyday exchange in changing media; governments took up the
project of creating currencies that supported their political
power; artists and writers raced to represent new forms of wealth
and interpret the issues they raised; and intellectuals struggled
to conceptualize, and tame, patterns of monetary transformation.
The result was a rich debate, still unsettled, about the sources of
value, the morality of the market, and the very nature of money.
Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural
History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment presents essays that
examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of
technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and
representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.
The United States has long epitomized capitalism. From its
enterprising shopkeepers, wildcat banks, violent slave plantations,
and raucous commodities trade to its world-spanning multinationals,
its massive factories, and the centripetal power of New York in the
world of finance, America has shaped political economy for two
centuries and more. But an understanding of "capitalism" is as
elusive as it is urgent. What does it mean to make capitalism a
subject of historical inquiry? What is its potential across
multiple disciplines, alongside different methodologies, and in a
range of geographic and chronological settings? And how does a
focus on capitalism change our understanding of American history?
American Capitalism collects cutting-edge research from prominent
scholars, sampling the latest work in the field. Rather than a
monolithic perspective, these broad-minded and rigorous essays
venture new angles on finance and debt, women's rights, slavery and
political economy, labor, and regulation, among other topics.
Together, the essays suggest emerging themes in the field: a
fascination with capitalism as it is made by public authority, how
it is experienced in the detail of daily life, how it spreads
across the globe, and how it can be reconceptualized as a discrete
and quantified object. A major statement for a wide-open field,
this book demonstrates the breadth and scope of the work the
history of capitalism can provoke.
The United States has long epitomized capitalism. From its
enterprising shopkeepers, wildcat banks, violent slave plantations,
huge industrial working class, and raucous commodities trade to its
world-spanning multinationals, its massive factories, and the
centripetal power of New York in the world of finance, America has
come to symbolize capitalism for two centuries and more. But an
understanding of the history of American capitalism is as elusive
as it is urgent. What does it mean to make capitalism a subject of
historical inquiry? What is its potential across multiple
disciplines, alongside different methodologies, and in a range of
geographic and chronological settings? And how does a focus on
capitalism change our understanding of American history? American
Capitalism presents a sampling of cutting-edge research from
prominent scholars. These broad-minded and rigorous essays venture
new angles on finance, debt, and credit; women's rights; slavery
and political economy; the racialization of capitalism; labor
beyond industrial wage workers; and the production of knowledge,
including the idea of the economy, among other topics. Together,
the essays suggest emerging themes in the field: a fascination with
capitalism as it is made by political authority, how it is claimed
and contested by participants, how it spreads across the globe, and
how it can be reconceptualized without being universalized. A major
statement for a wide-open field, this book demonstrates the breadth
and scope of the work that the history of capitalism can provoke.
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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