MONEY. The most pragmatic of inventions, the most self-evident. It emerges wherever exchange becomes too complex for barter, and soon becomes the measure of all value. It moves through society, through history, a creature of politics and belief.
Cacao, cloth, silver, shell, feasts, taxes, land and labour all participated in the work that money is now assumed to do.
In this series, the old tale, that money arose to ease the friction of barter and gradually matured into the instrument of capitalism, gives way to a more difficult picture. This is a story of temples, palaces, households, marketplaces, networks, and clans: of how they made money, legitimized it, and compelled trust in it. Of how debt came before cash, and obligation before the market.
Reading List
Berdan, Frances F. The Aztec Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Bermejo Tirado, Jesús, and Ignasi Grau Mira. Peasant Economies and Societies in Ancient Roman Iberia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Covey, R. Alan, and Jordan A. Dalton. Economies of the Inca World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Fauvelle, Mikael. Shell Money: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Hirth, Kenneth G. The Aztec Economic World: Merchants and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Hutson, Scott R. Ancient Maya Economies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Lydon, Ghislaine. ‘Paper Instruments in Early African Economies and the Debated Role of the Suftaja’. Cahiers d’Études Africaines 236 (2019): 1091–1118.
Prentiss, Anna Marie. Ancient and Pre-modern Economies of the North American Pacific Northwest. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Von Glahn, Richard. ‘The Origins of Paper Money in China’. In The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations That Created Modern Capital Markets, edited by William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst, 65–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Wiessner, Polly, Akii Tumu, and Nitze Pupu. A Historical Ethnography of the Enga Economy of Papua New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.