David McWilliams

“Quick-thinking Mercury, armed with his own cunning and smarts as well as his technology, money, dominated Pompeii’s markets and bazaars. The ordinary citizen understood the transformative power of commerce. In fact, our word “commerce” can be translated literally from the Roman phrase “com Merx” or “with Mercury,”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity

“Over the past 5,000 years, money has profoundly altered humanity and our relationships with each other and with the rest of the planet. It is arguably the defining technology of Homo sapiens. We have coevolved with money: we have shaped money, but money has also shaped us. Anthropologists often refer to humans as a “pyrophyte” species, one that is shaped by fire.4 The thread linking the observations in this book is that in the course of the last five millennia we have become—and apologies to the linguistic purists as I made this word up—a plutophyte species, meaning a species that has adapted to and been adapted by money. For 400,000 years, the technology that most influenced human development was fire; the contention of this book is that the crucial technology shaping humanity in the last 5,000 years has been money. We were a pyrophyte species but we have gradually become a plutophyte species.This book is about the relationship between a curious ape and a wondrous technology.”
― David McWilliams, The History of Money: A Story of Humanity