Making Money

Christine Desanâs Making Money is not only a fine monetary history of England. The 2014 book is relevant today. It shows cash and governments go together, the gold standard was a misnomer and central banking is political. And we should stop outsourcing money-creation to banks.

Auteur
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.

Texte du rabat

In this revisionist history of the development of the modern monetary system, Desan argues that money effectively creates economic activity rather than emerging from it. Her account demonstrates that money's design has been a project central to governance and formative to markets.

Contenu

• Introduction

• 1: Creation Stories

• 2: From Metal to Money: Producing the "Just Penny"

• 3: Commodity Money as an Extreme Sport: Flows, Famines, Debasements, and Imitation Pennies

• 4: The High Politics of Money: Strong Coin, Heavy Taxes, and the English Invention of Public Credit

• 5: The Social Stratigraphy of Coin and Credit in Late Medieval England

• 6: Priming the Pump: The Sovereign Path Towards Paying for Coin and Circulating Credit

• 7: Interests, Rights, and the Currency of Public Debt

• 8: Reinventing Money: The Beginning of Bank Currency

• 9: Re-theorizing Money: The Struggle over Money in the Modern Imagination

• 10: The Eighteenth Century Architecture of Modern Money

• Epilogue: The Gold Standard in an Era of Inconvertibility

• Conclusion: From Blood to Water

• Bibliography