Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Christine Desan (Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law, Harvard Law School)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 17.80cm
, Height: 3.40cm
, Length: 25.00cm
Weight: 1.052kg
ISBN: 9780198709572
ISBN 10: 0198709579
Pages: 502
Publication Date: 27 November 2014
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
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
Ms Desan displays exemplary scholarship in detailing money's origins, albeit in an academic style... her study is worth the effort. Christine Desan compares the design of commodity money with the design of money produced by modern banks of issue. The modern method shares the monopoly traditionally held by the public with private actors, pays them for money creation, and institutionalises self-interest at the heart of the political economy... As it institutionalised that profit-driven logic, the new design brought capitalism to the modern world. By exploring money's internal design my new book, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism, reveals both its collective engineering and the early modern revolution in making money. The European Financial Review
Christine Desans Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism... expands the limited theoretical interventions of myriad governance-view theorists into positive, empirical claims by telling the story of British money through law from the fall of Rome to the eighteenth-century financial revolution, and in so doing expands on them significantly... What Desan has given us, and earlier authors have not, is a thorough alternative, grounded in legal history, that, helpfully, includes an origin story for the orthodox account of moneys origins. Although some may continue to defend the orthodox conjectural history of money... they will be hard-pressed to do so on empirical grounds in light of Desans account. Andrew David Edwards, Law and Social Inquiry Desan's singular achievement has been to not only synthesize a vast literature but to also produce a richly detailed, compelling, and original account of how the development of market commerce and capitalism was largely dependent upon the transformation of the ways in which people thought about and made their money. Needless to say this brief review in no way does justice to the narrative reconstruction, eye-watering detail, and historiographical engagement which will surely make Desan's text the definitive account for some time to come. Simon Middleton, The Medieval Review Making Money is a fascinating story, full of both meticulous historical detail and compelling conceptual arguments about the relationship between forms of currency, political authority, and the creation of the modern state ... thought-provoking like David Graebers Debt, but firmly grounded in the minutiae of English history. In these times when everyone from gold bugs (like Ted Cruz, lets not forget) to Bitcoin enthusiasts is calling for a redefinition of money, it reminds us what a complicated and politically determined thing money always has been. James Kwak, The Baseline Scenario Christine Desans 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 Desans book far above the kind of literature that cultivates a generalizing view of money, its current forms, and institutional settings as inevitable expressions of human nature. The conclusions from her contribution to the analysis of money are arguments for changing prevailing monetary regimes. Desan equips us with historical arguments for reinventing money. Leopold Specht, International Journal of Constitutional Law 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, Journal of Economic Literature [T]hose interested in gaining a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of money... Will find this book invaluable. [Desans] approach... Is essentially a new history and analysis of how money is made. Katie Ball, Reviews in History 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 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
Ms Desan displays exemplary scholarship in detailing money's origins... her study is worth the effort. The Economist
Author Information
Christine A. Desan is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She teaches about the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory. She is the co-founder of Harvard's Program on the Study of Capitalism; with its co-director, Professor Sven Beckert (History), she has taught the Program's anchoring research seminar, the Workshop on the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism, since 2005. Desan's research explores money as a legal and political project, one that configures the market it sets out to measure.
