Ebook Making Money Coin Currency and the Coming of Capitalism Christine Desan 9780198709589 Books

Product details Paperback 512 pages Publisher Oxford University Press; Reprint edition (September 14, 2015) Language English ISBN-10 9780198709589 ISBN-13 978-0198709589 ASIN 0198709587

Making Money Coin Currency and the Coming of Capitalism Christine Desan 9780198709589 Books Reviews

• To be clear, bought this book as I had gradually come to realize that I did not understand "money". How did this concept come about, how does it work, and what does not work?
  
  I found this book a slow read, as I had to stop and reflect quite a lot. The history of money is quite a mess, much based in dogma rather than reason (as the history goes back much before the Age of Enlightenment). In my lifetime, "money" was a thing that simply worked. To my shock, from this book I find that the present form of "money" is very recent, and still not generally understood. (When we generally do not understand an essential aspect of our economy ... this is sobering.)
  
  You are not going to find any rigorous and exact theory as to the nature of "money" in this book, as ... we do not(!) have any such theory. As far as I can tell, this book does an excellent of bringing us to the current level of understanding.
  
  (If you find shocking that we do not exactly understand a critical aspect of our economy ... we agree.)
• Christine Desan's book puts forth a bold and believable account of how money evolved. Her reasoning is subtle and careful, even as she reconstructs the distant past. The work deserves attention across fields stretching from law and politics to business and finance.
• This book is an incredible achievement, with deep historical research and a strikingly original argument. What is more, the prose sings and carries. It is a great delight to read.
  Its central project is to locate and illuminate the onset of capitalism in a specific monetary shift in early modern England – in the move from the sovereign monopoly over money creation to the sovereign’s effectively ceding the power of money creation to the Bank of England, to be powered by the pulse of private interest. This also meant, of course, that the significant dimension of public gains from seigniorage, written into the creation of official legal tender, would come to be collected by private investors in the banking institutions. This form has been inherited in today’s prevailing institutional structures, with significant political, legal, and distributional effects. The book compellingly argues that this modern form of money would come to be christened globally as the privileged and dominant form. It now travels the world with the ideological cast of a universal, transhistorical phenomenon. This book will be widely read across disciplines as a central, path-breaking contribution to our understanding of modern money – and of the birth of the modern world, more broadly.
• To start off, I'm sure this book is going to be trashed by the gold bugs because it's based on reality as it is and not their 15th century version of it.....Guess what guys, the gold standard is dead and it's never coming back! Move on!
  Ignore those knuckle-dragging reviewers, and read this book.
  To avoid writing one of those long reviews that no one cares to read, I'll just say this, the author methodically details the evolution of the idea of money over many centuries, in England. That's what this book is. And the author does this very well, it's very enjoyable to read.
• A fascinating and well-researched look into the origins of the modern monetary system. The author presents a compelling and original argument regarding how the means of exchange is engineered for a particular purpose. In a groundbreaking move, the book successfully challenges the conception of money as a neutral commodity.
• Very interesting book -- I learned a lot and enjoyed reading the history -- very nicely written.
• "Money was and should be created at the center of the community". You don't get it? Try to see this as a piece of monetary creationism ;) Have a little more faith in legal engineering - a legal positivist's version of intelligent design. If you worship the Great Stakeholder and enjoy paying your taxes, you will love this book.
  
  I'm not kidding. I've rarely seen such a garbled prose. The invention of banknotes is presented as a revolution by which the regalian function of minting commodity money was privatized, thereby legitimizing profit-seeking and self-interested behavior by bankers. As if the Bank of England in 1694 could be called a private entreprise with its various privileges, as if self-interest and profit had not existed before. The author wishes to open the reader's eyes to this invisible, forgotten revolution. Economists are supposed to be unaware of this historical fact, for they don't realize how money was designed (i.e. meddled with) by political authorities. Talk of a straw man!
  
  The book also has postmodern tendencies lots of narrative, little analytics. For instance, the author gives no prior definitions and discusses at length what money "really is". The book lacks a methodological preamble; there are unbacked claims and attribution of intentions to actors; holism, etc. Again, if you like critical theory, you might enjoy it. Otherwise, you have been warned.