The History of Money

by Jack Weatherford

In his most widely appealing book yet, one of today's leading authors of popular anthropology looks at the intriguing history and peculiar nature of money, tracing our relationship with it from the time when primitive men exchanged cowrie shells to the imminent arrival of the all-purpose electronic cash card.

Genres: History, Economics, Nonfiction, Finance, Business, Money, Anthropology

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Jack McIver Weatherford is the DeWitt Wallace Professor of anthropology at Macalester College in Minnesota. He is best known for his 2004 book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. In 2006, he was awarded the Order of the Polar Star, and the Order of Genghis Khan in 2022, Mongolia’s two highest national honors. Moreover, he was honoured with the Order of the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho by the Government of Bolivia in 2014.
His books in the late 20th century on the influence of Native American cultures have been translated into numerous languages. In addition to publishing chapters and reviews in academic books and journals, Weatherford has published numerous articles in national newspapers to popularize his historic and anthropological coverage of Native American cultures, as well as the American political culture in Congress in the 20th century. In recent years, he has concentrated on the Mongols by looking at their impact since the time that Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes in 1206.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE ARE FREE BUT YOU CAN KEEP 'EM FOR THE BIRDS AND BEES



On the second page of the first chapter of this book about money, Jack Weatherford is talking about human sacrifice in the Aztec religion ("up the long flight of steps to the altar where the priests ripped out his heart") – later on p 64 we get a description of the Templars being burned to death in 1310 (I'll spare you a quote) – and anyone might think that our author is trying desperately to jive up his boring subject with regular bursts of ultraviolence. But the subject of money (where did it come from? What does it do? Where does it go?) is fairly wild, unlikely and in no need of gimmicks. Money itself is a gimmick. It's a trick. Cash is a metaphor! Visitors at the US Mint at the end of 14th Street, Washington DC, can buy sheets of uncut dollar bills. The tourists use it as cute wrapping paper.

This book lurched from being great (explaining stuff I always wanted to know about, joining a lot of puzzling dots together) to being very aggravating (e.g. not explaining – okay, WHY did the Romans allegedly not produce anything and make such a cock-up of their economy, they had a badass empire for a long time, no, I don't get it).

THAT CLINKING CLANKING SOUND



Lydia was a kingdom in Greece before Greece was Greece and they invented coins. Everywhere else they had local currencies like cowrie shells or goats or bags of lettuce or human heads. All these were impractical in terms of transportation and there were cultural difficulties – you sling your bag of heads on the merchant's table in York or Marseilles and ask for three slaves, a silver bracelet and a packet of Marlboro and the merchant will likely tell you to bugger off and take your smelly bag with you. That's if you've got the heads through customs.

Anyway

the use of coins that had been weighed and stamped in the royal workshop made it possible for commerce to proceed much more rapidly and honestly, and it allowed people to participate even if they did not own a scale.

Because gold itself was used as money before coins, but you had the hassle of weighing it and figuring out if it was good quality gold or had been cut with baking soda. So King Croesus of Lydia solved that. Well, probably it was some sharp slave kid who pointed it out, not the King. History does not record such a detail. But because of the innovation of lovely coins the focus of economic life shifted from the palace (where tributes had been paid and grants had been made) to the marketplace (where you could make a fast buck). As soon as the public marketplace became a reality, the first public brothels and the first public casinos followed very swiftly. Ha ha, I bet this does not surprise you either.

WE GOT A LOT OF WHAT IT TAKES TO GET ALONG



So coins were durable, were standardised, were easy to use and were revolutionary, the sparkly little things.

Money made possible the organisation of society on a scale much greater and far more complex than either kinship or force could have achieved. The use of money does not require the face-to-face interaction and intense relationships of a kinship-based system. Money became the social nexus connecting humans in many more social relationships, no matter how distant or how transitory, than had previously been possible. ...Work and human labour itself bcame a commodity with a value tht could be fixed in money according to its importance, the amount of skill or strength it required, and the time it took. As money became the standard value for work, it was also becoming the standard of value for time itself.

The creation of cash magically simplified complex transactions – now you could convert fines, taxes, dowries and wages into cash values. The economic energy unleashed by the invention of cash created in turn the public market which demanded in turn more skills in quickly figuring all these new transactions which meant that people now needed mathematics and to be able to think in abstractions. Cash created a brain revolution.

Humans have found many ways to bring order to the phenomenological flow of existence, and money is one of the most important. Money is a strictly human invention that is itself a metaphor : it stands for something else. It allows humans to structure life in incredibly complex ways

Well, the Greeks flourished, passed on the great invention to the Romans, they had a time of it too, but they finally lost the plot, and exactly why their economy unravelled is one of Mr Weatherford's several weak spots, he doesn't really explain it. He says "the Romans produced comparatively little"

Reg : All right, all right, apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... WHAT have the Romans done ever for us?

TIME PASSED

After the Romans, we get 1000 years of feudalism when "money played only the wispy shadow of the role it had held". The clinking, clanking sound was replaced by the mooing, baaing and bellowing sound. However, fortunately for everyone, horrible massive violence was just around the corner to jump-start the economy again. This was : The Crusades.

As the Crusades progressed it became painfully clear that they needed better security for the flocks of tourists who were now keen to visit Jerusalem and Tyre and so forth. (In those days they were called "pilgrims"). So a special task force was established called the Knights of the Temple of Solomon – the Knights Templar, much beloved by tinfoil hatwearers the world over. They were chaste young men who were encouraged to channel their repressed sexuality into limitless violence against Moslems. They quickly got very rich because they were the Group Four and the Fedex of the Holy Land and they were allowed to keep all their Moslem spoils of war, and people back in France and Germany liked the cut of their jib and gave them donations, and some people donated instead of having to go to the bother of actually crusading themselves and getting all dusty and ill. And because the Templars protected the roads from France and Germany to Palestine, they became bankers by default. They were able to take 1000 ducats from a guy in Dusseldorf, and give it to him when he turned up in Jerusalem, without physically transporting it. Because they had money everywhere, by then, and because people trusted them. They had over 800 big castles and all that. So then they went into banking big style, before it even had a name, and were making loans to kings and nobles here there and everywhere.

So then King Philip IV of France went broke (kings did in those days) and decided that a good way of getting his hands on piles of dough was to denounce the Knights Templar for every sort of abomination (read : homosexuality), abolish them, and collect the loot. Which he did, and few tears were shed, just like we seldom boo hoo when the odd banker throws himself from the 86th floor these days.

IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S ME – NO, WAIT A MINUTE – IT'S YOU, NOT ME


This book bounces along in a very readable way but hits the buffers and fails, alas, to do some crucial explaining. When people discuss the subject of money, banking, economics, this whole nexus of ideas, there are a couple of holy grail notions that pop up all the time that never get properly explained, and maybe it's that they do get explained but all the explanations can't penetrate my expensive haircut and get through to my actual brain. That is a possibility i have considered. One of these crucial ideas is this thing about THE GOLD STANDARD. One minute it's there because it absolutely has to be, next minute it isn't and everything's still okay. It's like an economy is Wile E Coyote chasing the Roadrunner over a cliff. In the cartoon he's still running in the middle of the air. Then he looks down and realises there's no ground anymore. At that point he falls. But when economies abandon the gold standard they know there's no ground under their feet anymore, they do it consciously, and running in the middle of the air is not a problem. So Mr Weatherfield was able to describe WHAT happened but never explained why or how it was all able to continue or when it didn't work out, why.

Then there was hyperinflation, which is when money develops a laughing sickness and goes stark staring mad. It happened in various places at specific times – Germany in the 20s, Bolivia in the 80s. At the end of the miserable couple of years when everyone is going broke, there's no more credit anywhere and cash is worthless, at this point, not before, some big talking suit swans in and says "Okay boys, the new currency will be issued tomorrow, and it will work because I say so" and it does. (Happy days are here again, tra la la - roll another number for grandma). Okay, why didn't the previous financial suit do the same trick?

Anyway.... one of those books where when you finish it you think you should read a bigger book about the same subject.

[Andrej Karpathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a relatively short whirlwind tour of some aspects of the history of money, presented chronologically from antiquity to approx. 1997, when this book was published.

Basically, due to a number of properties of asset creation in society (e.g. role of skill/expertise, need for up-front investment in production, batch efficiencies, etc.) various assets regularly end up in surplus or scarcity for any one person or organization, leading to a need for some system of exchange. Money fills this need and becomes the scalar signal that communicates scarcity across society in an emergent, decentralized manner.

The book goes over multiple forms of money that have existed over the course of history stopping by different places of spacetime in each chapter. It touches on gift economy and debt in small societies in presence of trust, barter in cases of lack of trust, early commodity money that typically has intrinsic value and is a convenient means of exchange (e.g. cacao seeds used in the Aztec empire to "top off" an uneven barter, cigarettes, manufactured items (furs), coins (gold/silver), animals (cattle), or even people (slaves)), early representative money (checks, notes, receipts, or even paper money as long as it was backed by gold), fiat money ("worthless" paper not backed by anything tangible), and electronic money where we transition the whole system from atoms to bits. Not covered are cryptocurrencies as since these were not around in 1997 (eg bitcoin, which on top of all that innovation is also not governed by any central authority and is secured cryptography due the computational hardness of some inverse operations in our Universe).

I enjoyed the discussion of various societies and their relationship to money as it evolved. E.g. Sparta/Egypt/Persians and other traditional empires largely rejected money in favor of government as the organizing principle, while other empires (Greeks, Romans, etc) quickly embraced it. Plato/Aristotle both had odd views on it. The Aztecs and others regulated it and its exchange tightly. Merchants were not historically part of high stratums of society, and the pursuit of money was not pervasive or even looked up to. This is fun to contemplate against the backdrop of our capitalist way of life.

I also didn't realize, until reading this book, just how common and pervasive it was for governments to tamper with the money supply and monetary policy over the ages, often to no good outcomes in the long term. Eg Nero in Ancient Rome minted coins with progressively less silver as he struggled to fund the bloating Roman government beurocracy. Various other governments over the years printed a ton of money causing massive inflation and crumbling the entire economic system. On the unintended side of things, it was interesting to read about the discovery of the New World and the California gold rush in mid 1800, which both flooded the market with gold, again causing some havoc.

Anyway, I think the book can be a little too hasty in glossing over some developments and leans more heavily on description instead of explanation, but overall covers a large portion of interesting historical aspects of money and its place in a number of ancient and recent societies. I would think of it more as a series of pointers and anecdotes instead of a definitive first principles guide.

[Kersplebedeb · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is what i think of as an 'airport book' -- a lot of vivid anecdotes, memorable imagery, and lively prose, however beyond that in terms of actual history or historical insight, not much more than you could get from reading wikipedia for an evening. After some interesting musings in the first few chapters, the book retreats to cultural trivia alternating with a bare-bones history of the mechanics of currency. Not that it was boring, but it was not what i was hoping for.

Add to this the fact that the author's basic view of money as a way of organizing society seems to be positive, i.e. money brings freedom, money brings progress, and all the ills that we might blame money for are in fact the fault of government sticking its nose where it doesn't belong. In other words, basic neoliberal dogma.

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written by an anthropologist--Discusses the history of money and how money from cowerie shells to blips on a screen has affected human societies.
IF YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT ECONOMICS AND EVEN IF YOU DO, THIS IS THE BEST MOST EASILY ACCESIBLE OVERVIEW. EXTREMELY ENTERTAINING AND WELL-WRITTEN.

[João · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anthropologist casually predicts bitcoin and the rise of the cypherpunk movement, the eventual demise of paper money, hyperinflation of the States and the fall of the dollar as the global currency reserve.
With the FED printing record numbers of dollars (just in 2020, out of thin air, they printed 22% of every dollar ever created), and The Great Reset of the IMF and the World Economic Forum well under its way... It's now more than crystal clear that during the next decade all predictions will become true. Not bad from a book written in the 90s.

[Wind · Rating 5 out of 5]

Çok beğendim. Akademik dille yazılmadığı için insanı sıkmıyor. Okuması çok keyifli. Paranın tarihini bir kültürel antropologun gözünden okumak oldukça zevkli. Çok fazla yeni bilgi öğreniyorsunuz.

Her ne kadar yazılmasının üzerinden 24 yıl geçmiş olmasına rağmen yaptığı tespitler oldukça aktüel. Paranın yoktan var edilmesi, enflasyon gibi kavramları bence son derece kolay anlaşılır bir şekilde anlatmış.

Antik dönemlerden modern zamanlara kadar paranın gelişimini merak edenler için ideal bir eser.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a fine book. So accessible, so fully researched. Billionaire Charles R. Schwab calls it "THE book to read" about "the revolutionary transformation of the meaning and use of money".

The first chapter covers the origins of money - of coins, of trading, of markets - in ancient Lydia and it is unforgettable. Weatherford's background as an ethnographer whose widely read in economics, including a knowledge of electronic money systems through the late 1990's, gives his book a historically balanced perspective that's utterly lacking in economists all the way from great classic thinkers like Ricardo and Adam Smith to moderns like Keynes, Shumpeter and Friedman.

Yet Weatherford, for all his expertise, writes for all of us. His book is a great read for a high school student curious to learn about how the world really works.

There are tons of histories of money out there. Search Google or Amazon for "history of money" and a dozen titles appear, recent ones, mostly, by trendy insider academics like Nial Ferguson. They all fit into Weatherford's history of money. His history fits into none of theirs (but they don't site him because a) he's not an insider economist and b) most of today's economists wear historical blinders).

Weatherford's outlook as an ethnographer amazes. Take his 1988 book Indian Givers: How Native Americans Transformed the World. It's a precursor of sorts to his 1997 History of Money. It articulates the stupendous, utterly unacknowledged (because largely coerced) contribution of Native Americans to the growth of European civilization, to colonialism itself, and latterly to American capitalism.

But it truly is a history about how Native Americans transformed the world. Ad In an amazing chapter he writes about the silver extracted from the mountainous Potosi mine in Bolivia. This theft literally fueled the rise of the Spanish empire and, in addition, the rise of a middle class of craftsmen and merchants that spread from Spain to all of Europe. Every ounce of this precious metal was extracted by Native Americans captured and enslaved by the Spanish. Subtract Potosi from Spain's wealth and you have no Spanish empire.

This we don't read in our history books. Will we ever?

[Tariq Mahmood · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a definite guide to various versions of money and its impact on culture. Money in terms of age is only at its beginning. The future will see money evolve above the governments controlling it with the advent of e-money. The success of e-money will be death knell for paper money outside government control. I felt the book left a very positive impression of money's future on me, making money an egalitarian factor which could glue the people together breaking the current monopoly of financial sector and the government.

[Jack · Rating 1 out of 5]

Largely obvious; did not learn anything from it.
Also outdated.

[Bookish Dervish · Rating 3 out of 5]

The history of money.
This book goes back in time to check upon how people managed trading. It studies the ancient cultures of the Americas where cacao seeds/beans (among many other things) were used as monetary units. They were even used to sponsor human sacrifices!!! . Then the book travels to the Mediterranean (the lydian kingdom), the birthplace of gold, silver and electrum coins. {electrum is an alloy. A mixture of gold and silver}
It discusses, too, the effect of money on cultures, politics, sciences..... It allowed millions of people to cooperate under the ruling of an empire(under the ruling of Alexander the great) , it dectated a sort of mastery of mathematics and set the ground for the emerging of the hellenestic empire. All of which are tremendous milestones of human history. For example, scholars have noticed that most civilizations reached a certain level of sophistication that they could not get through, the Greeks, however could penetrate this law barrier because they were neighbouring to the Lydian, who invented money.
In this book, you will learn about, among many things:
*inflation
*gold backing up a currency
*trade and markets
*history of banking
*minting coins
*etimology of some currencies (dollars, reals,....)
*state control over money
*... Etc

I find this infographic very informative.



As a further search, I stumbled upon this documentary, which really completes the picture, providing additional pieces to the puzzle of money.
https://youtu.be/84h_8-UlUQA

[E. Kahn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Stopped at chapter 5, which is just sheer nonsense. Weatherford affects to believe that the Romans declined because taxes were too high, which is the kind of take I expect from a YouTube truck rant, not a purportedly serious (if popular) history.

[Meaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an excellent book chock full of information and ideas I had never really given much thought to before. The author's project was ambitious -- cover money around the world from its invention up to the present day -- and, impressively, he delivered, and without being too inclusive or long-winded.

I think this book was kind of dated, though. It was published in 1997 and a lot has changed in the past twelve years, what with online shopping and banking and so on becoming so big and so on. I wish the author would publish a second edition, updated to the present day. But times are changing so fast anyway, probably a second edition would be outdated within a year or two.

[Molly Brodak · Rating 5 out of 5]

awesome...utterly interesting. You need to know the history of money. You'll never look at it the same way.

[Marcus · Rating 3 out of 5]

The illusion in motion. Interesting, but not super entertaining. Of course maybe that is expecting too much given the topic.

[Rune · Rating 3 out of 5]

Packed with interesting facts and tidbits of history, but lacks an overarching purpose. Very focused on US economy.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

In looking for a book about monetary history, I stumbled onto this book by Jack Weatherford, who is an anthropologist and historian. I had previously read his book about Ginghis Khan, which was very enlightening as he delved much into the cultural and human advancements brought about by the rise of the Mongols.

Here again I was not disappointed in ‘The History of Money’ to cover so much interesting research on the cultural significance and stabilizing impact that the transformation in society be the ample stability of money. Weatherford takes you on an historical journey to the birthplace of money; the evolution from barter to coin currency; and the progression into the modern economies.

He does spend time on the gold and silver backing of national currencies, but appears a bit incomplete in substantiating his views on commodity-backed currency vs. fiat-based currencies, and the effects of the transition from the former to the latter. Further he the discusses much of the factors (again, rather incompletely) of reasons for the devaluing of currencies and inflation.

The final section on Digital Money was a bit of a let down for me and the result of a lower ranking. I felt his explanations of today’s currency (noted as ‘digital money’) were inadequate and lacked adequate depth. Basically, it is not as simple as implied to note many of the causations for the rise of issues from digital currency.

On the whole, however, I recommend this nice, light read as a solid book for one to garner a greater grasp on money history.

[Mirek Jasinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title might suggest a boring lecture. It is not! Just have a look at this quote from the book:

"ON TUESDAY, MAY 12,1310, FRENCH SOLDIERS LOADED fifty-four bound men onto carts and took them into the coun- try outside of Paris, where they stripped off the men's clothes and tied
them to stakes surrounded by piles of wood. As the prisoners vocif- erously screamed their innocence, the guards lit the wood beneath them. The flames crawled higher, singeing their hair and lapping at their flesh. The heat caused huge blisters to erupt and their skin to split open as their fat liquefied and ran down their limbs in delicate rivulets of flame. The roar of the flames gradually drowned out the screams of the burning men".

It provides a good introduction to the history of money (and mankind). To be recommended.

[Alex Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Light, snappy, anecdotal, delightful and idiosyncratic pop history of the stuff that everyone knows is not supposed to make you happy but nobody’s in a great hurry to give away.

Published in 1998, it just barely touches on the topics of blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies, but what it does touch, it touches presciently.

[Waqas Gondal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an impressive experience reading the book. It covers all aspects of money till 1997. A lot of things have been changed since then. Despite that it still worth reading.

[Sergio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Literally the history of “money” - the physical representative - this book is easy to read, full of anecdotes, and with some interesting stories regarding money.

[Panos Matsinopoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even if this book is a little old (1997), it really helped me a lot to understand how the money came be what it is today. It certainly served its purpose. I am really glad I read it.

[Evan Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of interesting historical tidbits and etymologies. Offers insightful perspective on the shaping of the modern world. Needs a new revision to include bitcoin, etc.

[Aleksandra Gacevic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gives a completely different perspective to how money shaped and influenced human societies

[Clint Carlson · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this is about money, it's really about selfish human nature, capitalism, and finding tools to build a hierarchy in society (almost always to the benefit of those in control of the money).

SPOILER - In a way, it saw the future as it almost exactly describes the current Robinhood/Gamestop/AMC debacle that is just boiling over.

How do we create a future that isn't dependent on social constructs of made-up ownership of value?

[Wolfgang Kasper · Rating 3 out of 5]

Money and opportunism

This is not a history of money, but an economic and social history, in which references to money pop up time and again.

I liked the disdain for the persistent opportunism of governments and international authorities that the author lets often shine through the text. The book is particularly good when it discusses what happened after the gold standard was abandoned and the scarcity of precious metals ceased to act as an anchor on public deficits covered by printing more paper money. He shows how —under the present “finance-minister standard”— governments conjure up countless new reasons to inflate the money supply to finance their deficits. In the years since publication in 1997, the opportunistic deficit finance by money printing has probably even exceeded the author’s worst fears.

I liked particularly the very entertaining description of Bolivia’s hyperinflation, because I was there, too, at the time . Episodes like the Bolivian story of the 1980s, or the German and Hungarian episodes post-WW 1 are always amusing to read. But wait till you get caught in one!

Nowhere in the book is money defined. Sometimes, it is equated with cash (highly liquid means of payment); in other contexts it means “gross monetary assets” (cash plus claims on others), yet in others “net monetary assets” (gross monetary assets minus liabilities), in yet others it means total wealth, I.e. including real assets. Even frequent flyer points and food stamps are added to the money volume. The lack of a precise definition sometimes leads to misleading conclusions.

The attentive reader will gradually distill from the stories that money serves three important functions: as a means of payment that furthers the division of labour, a store of value over time and a standard reference to compare the values of different things. The reader must also keep in mind that money can only fulfil these functions properly, if it is scarce, a point that often gets lost in the stories the author tells us. Only when he discusses the gold standard are we told that neither bankers nor politicians can be trusted with resisting the temptation of opportunistically inflating the money volume.

The book is wide-ranging and wordy, which makes it entertaining, but also a bit cumbersome. For example, gruesome details of how Aztec priests dispatched fellow humans, how French bankers (the Knights Templar) were roasted on pyres in Paris in 1310 or how fast human flesh freezes at —30 degrees add nothing to an understanding of money.

As always, it is dangerous for historians to end the story with a dose of futurology. The book was published in 1997, i.e. before the euro and before bitcoin. But the author speculates about ‘cyber money’ without acknowledging that it must be scarce. He talks instead about people taking control over what and how much money to create. And when he predicts that many sorts of money will be created in cyberspace, he ignores that the users of money face relatively high information and other transaction costs, so that many sorts of cash won’t survive.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

As anticipated, “the” history of money is quite the story. From extracting hapless villager hearts to pay off the local deity, to dispersing immaterial numerical bits to win crap off Ebay, this is a most interesting development. Weatherford maintains an identifiable structure of three monetary phases, while filling the narrative with any number of fascinating anecdotes. The Spanish/Mexican Peso was the primary currency of the fledgling US?!? That grants an ironic precedent to my statement last year that the Dollar is the new Peso of the world. The author notes the perfect, though somewhat disturbing logic to the later addition/replacement of “In God We Trust” on our buck (indeed the nickname for deer skins which previously represented an important monetary vehicle for the early settlers). In short, great Trivial Pursuit factoids, but also a fun read.

At least until the last “Phase.” Comparatively this part seems a bit tepid as the author expounds upon the digital age. Necessary as this is to his thesis, the contemporaniety of this portion makes much of this segment seem somewhat typical and incongruously speculative in relation to the fairly bizarre, earlier development of monetary history. In fact, the baseless nature of electronic “money” might be read as the opposite of ye olde silver coinage, cowrie shells, and bowls of goat milk utilized to buy whatever. Or at least, if I read this correctly, this is the next great transmogrification into the as-yet unknown.

Perhaps it’s his concluding pages that bummed me out a bit. Here the focus is on the cadre of “young, single, male” currency traders whose rash, loosely-informed guesswork controls global monetary valuations more than any other production or governmental factors (circa 1997 anyway). Whether this is overstated or not, it certainly seems to tie into our current situation. Can’t wait for the ensuing unknown…

[Tom Schulte · Rating 2 out of 5]

According to Herodotus, the Lydians were the first people to use gold and silver coins and the first to establish retail shops in permanent locations. This statement of Herodotus is one of the pieces of evidence often cited in behalf of the argument that Lydians invented coinage, at least in the West, even though the first coins were neither gold nor silver but an alloy of the two called electrum. This book covers an arc from before the first coinage to the predicted, cash-less future. As such, it is a breathless ride. There are couple of points of fact that give me pause on considering the reliability of this author's research. First, the author states "In God We Trust", which first appeared on U.S. coins in 1864 and has appeared on paper currency since 1957 (thank you, Ike), replaced the silver basis for the dollar. However, there is really a decade came there as they were printed through 1964: "Silver Certificates could be redeemed for silver until 1968. Although still considered a valid currency, Silver Certificates have not been issued since 1965." (I collected the "In God We Trust" transitional bills, so knew both still were redeemable in silver.) Then, the author claims Diocletian, Roman emperor from 284 to 305, switched confiscatory state persecution of Christians from them to pagans since pagans had the wealth Christians didn't, makeing it an economic policy. I don't think the emperor was moved by miracles or faith and also doubt the political scheming as being a significant motive for a ruler responsible for an empire-wide persecution that has been considered to be one of the bloodiest and most ruthless persecutions in the history.

[Rachel Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a comprehensive history of the means of exchange through out the ages. It brings us right up to the present day (well present day when the book was written in 97)
The author discusses inflation, intentional devaluation of money, and how we've arrived at the systems that we have today.
though the authors intention did not seem political I learned a lot about politics especially the role government has upon the money supply.
I found this book for sale at the library and picked it up because I was at a stage of wanting to earn lots of money so I hoped learning the history of money would help in my quest.
I just finished reading it today and I've decided that the money game is not something I want to play because one never wins or wins for long (see pg 246)

[Ritesh Pase · Rating 4 out of 5]

For someone with no background on this subject this was a good read. It is not necessarily an information based book but rather a good entertainer o the topic of how money has evolved through human history and how it has impacted human history at different times. I read/heard this book on Audible and hence was able to endure through some of the sections of the book where the author goes in bit of a rant mode.

I believe altogether too much time is spent on the post 1850 era and the book is far too US specific in this era. There was an opportunity to be concise in this section of the book.

[Jo Deann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really did like the book although it took me awhile to get through it. It takes the reader from the times of bartering for goods and services all the way up to our electronic system that we have today. It talks a lot about the deflation of paper money due to the lack of metal assets (gold, silver, etc) and how that happened in the first place. There is a ton of info in the book it's at times overwhelming, but I did learn a great deal.