Toward a world history of money : a book review essay

Money makes the world go round, and so it's no surprise that there are many trade titles about how to make it; there are however much fewer robust university-press titles that aim to explain its historical evolution from antiquity right through to modern times. And fewer still are articles laying out the state of the field. This may be a surprise given the importance of money to academic inquiry. To my knowledge, this is the first attempt to provide such state-of-the-field since Joe Cribb and Glyn Davies’ respective classic works were reviewed.1 Here, I focus on coinage, and coin debasement in particular, as opposed to the history-of finance literature that foregrounds banknotes and securities. The article is therefore framed around Frank Holt's newly published When Money Talks, which deals with numismatics as a profession. To a lesser degree, I will draw on William Goetzmann’s magisterial book, and on David Orrell and Roman Chlupaty's book, both published in 2016 and already reviewed.