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Honest review of The History of Money bookChris MG Bowlin --- Here are a few of my favorite things :)

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The History of Money Paperback – March 10, 1998

by Jack Weatherford (Author)

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“If you’re interested in the revolutionary transformation of the meaning and use of money, this is the book to read!”—Charles R. Schwab

Cultural anthropologist Jack Weatherford traces our relationship with money, from primitive man’s cowrie shells to the electronic cash card, from the markets of Timbuktu to the New York Stock Exchange. The History of Money explores how money and the myriad forms of exchange have affected humanity, and how they will continue to shape all aspects of our lives—economic, political, and personal.

“A fascinating book about the force that makes the world go round—the dollars, pounds, francs, marks, bahts, ringits, kwansas, levs, biplwelles, yuans, quetzales, pa’angas, ngultrums, ouguiyas, and other 200-odd brand names that collectively make up the mysterious thing we call money.”—Los Angeles Times

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About the Author

Jack Weatherford is the New York Times bestselling author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, and The History of Money, among other acclaimed books. A specialist in tribal peoples, he was for many years a professor of anthropology at Macalester College in Minnesota and now divides his time between the United States and Mongolia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The World Market

A young mother, barefoot and bare-breasted hurries out of a mud hut with her nursing baby tied loosely at her side in a cloth sling and with six eggs floating in a bowl of milk balanced delicately on her head. Even though the sun has not yet broken over the horizon, sweat ripples across her face and drips from the gold ring piercing the middle of her lower lip. From the ring, the sweat drips down her chest and rolls across the decorative scars that glisten on her stomach.One morning in every five, she arises before dawn to begin the eleven-mile trek from her village of Kani Kombole in the West African country of Mali to the town of Bandiagara, where a market is held every five days. She hurries out of the family compound to join her sisters, her female cousins, and the other village women who have already begun the slow climb up the cliff that contains the tombs of their ancestors and that forms part of the Bandiagara Escarpment, a rise of some 1,500 feet to the plateau above.

As the panting women slowly climb the rocky face of the escarpment, the mud and thatch huts gradually recede from view until they appear to be nothing more than sand castles on a beach. In the heat, the two-and three-story huts, the rickety corncribs, and the goat pens seem to melt in the first rays of the penetrating tropical sun. The women march for nearly three hours. They carry their nursing infants with them, but must leave behind the heavier children who are too young to make the arduous journey on their own. On her head or back, each woman carries something to sell in the marketplace—a bag of tomatoes, a bunch of small onions, a bowl of chilies, or a sack of sweet potatoes. Flies buzz around them constantly, attracted by the moving feast of fresh foods. Occasionally, the women stop to rest on some large rocks in the shade of a lonely and misshapen baobab tree in an otherwise austere landscape. They take small sips from the milk bowl, but they cannot rest for long. Pestered by the growing swarm of insects and always in a hurry to get to market before their customers arrive and before the heat of the sun peaks, the women push solemnly ahead.

A short distance ahead of the women, a small caravan of men marches with donkeys piled so high with millet that they look like parading haystacks. Even though all of the travelers come from the same village and often from the same families, the men and women travel in separate groups on their separate missions.

On the other side of the world in an apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a young man clutching a new leather briefcase given to him as a graduation gift waits for an elevator. Dressed in a gray suit, gym shoes, and a raincoat, but without a tie, he steps into the elevator, which is already crowded. With a silent nod, the young man puts the briefcase between his knees and awkwardly ties his floral-print silk tie without elbowing his neighbors. As he leaves the building and moves onto the sidewalk, he joins a rapidly moving column of people from adjoining buildings headed for the subway where they join even more people pressed together in the cars that carry them south to the Financial District at the southern tip of the island. After emerging from the subway, the man pauses to buy a sesame bagel, which he plunges into his pocket, and a paper cup filled with fresh-roasted Ethiopian-blend coffee, which he sips through a hole in the plastic lid. Five days a week he makes the same commute from his apartment building to the New York Stock Exchange, situated among some of the tallest skyscrapers in the world.

The town of Bandiagara, Mali, lies in the Sahel, the borderland between the southern Sahara and the thick rain forest along the West African coast. Once in the market, the women of Kani Kombole go their separate ways. One takes her onions to the onion truck where the buyer will transport them to the city. Those with tomatoes spread out their sashes on the ground and arrange their produce on them, protecting their goods from the sun under small canopies of thinly plaited straw on gnarly sticks. The woman who had balanced the milk and eggs on her head takes her load to the dairy area, where she displays the eggs in a small gourd next to the larger bowl of milk. Once she has sold her goods to townspeople or traveling wholesalers, the village woman might buy a plastic pail, some tobacco, a block of salt, a few cups of sugar, or some other luxury goods to take home with her. The food, however, is for the townspeople to buy, not her. The few overripe bananas from the coast, the dried dates brought in from an oasis in the Sahara, and the expensive oranges from the coastal farms cost more than the whole load of vegetables or milk that she was able to bring to market.

Except in the Muslim communities where almost all public activities fall into the domain of males, women operate and manage the markets throughout West Africa. The women carry the produce to and from the market, and they negotiate the buying and selling. Most of the people who come to the market as buyers or sellers are women. Although men may wander through on a specific mission, the interactive style of the market is female and based largely around enduring ties of kinship, friendship, and personal knowledge of one another.

Despite their illiteracy and complete lack of formal education, most of the women in the marketplace at Bandiagara can negotiate, buy, and sell with great facility. They barter produce for produce, will accept payment in coins and paper money—often in several different currencies—and can make change. Even though they cannot read the words on the money, they recognize the value of the different bills primarily by their color, shape, size, and the images on them. Because transactions are made publicly in front of a line of other attentive women, the marketplace abounds in advice and help in each transaction to make sure that it proceeds according to tradition. Women bargain and barter often without even sharing a common language. All they need is a couple of words and a set of hand gestures to signify the numbers. A clenched fist means five; a hand clap signifies ten.

The milk seller’s primary competitors in Bandiagara are not other women like her in the neighborhood; they are the dairy farmers of Wisconsin, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. The imported milk is condensed, canned, and distributed free in the poor countries of Africa. Although clearly marked “not for sale” in English, it persistently shows up for sale in the stall immediately next to the young mother from Kani Kombole. The amount of canned milk for sale depends in part on economic conditions in North America, Europe, and the South Pacific. It depends on how much milk Nestlé, Hershey, or relative to the French franc, to which the West African franc of Mali is tied. It depends on how hot the summer is and how much ice cream people eat; it depends on the world’s annual yield of soybeans, one of the major competitors of milk products. The amount of canned milk for sale in Bandiagara in any given month also depends on the dairy subsidies and the foreign aid appropriations made by the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C.; the food policies of the United Nations high commissioner for refugees in Geneva and the European Common Market headquartered in Brussels; and the mercurial aid programs of religious and other private charitable organizations around the world.

When there is an abundance of donated milk on the Bandiagara market, the young mother is less likely to sell her fresh milk. When the cans of milk disappear, she will earn more money and will be able to take home more goods that day. Her eggs provide a small financial cushion that help to stabilize her income somewhat, since foreign food programs frequently donate milk products but rarely send eggs abroad. She can usually sell the eggs, even on days when she and her family drink the bowl of unsold milk rather than carry it all the way back to Kani Kombole.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown Currency
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 10, 1998
Edition ‏ : ‎ Reprint
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0609801724
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0609801727
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.12 x 0.69 x 7.95 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #179,048 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #91 in Economic History (Books)
- #110 in Money & Monetary Policy (Books)
- #116 in General Anthropology

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Jack Weatherford

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Jack Weatherford is the New York Times bestselling author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed The world The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, Genghis Khan and the Quest for God, and The History of Money. His books have been published in more than thirty languages.

In 2006 he spoke at the United Nations at the invitation of Russia and India to honor the 800th anniversary of the founding of the Mongol nation by Genghis Khan. In 2007 President Enkhbayar of Mongolia awarded him the Order of the Polar Star. In 2022 on the 860th anniversary of the birth of Genghis Khan, President Khurelsukh made him the first foreigner to receive Mongolia’s highest honor the Order of Chinggis Khan which had only been awarded fifteen times in Mongolian history.

Although the original Spanish edition of Indian Givers was banned in some parts of Latin America, nearly a quarter of a century later in 2014 Bolivia honored him for this work on the indigenous people of the Americas with the Order of the Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho, Antonio José Sucre and named him Honorary Cultural Ambassador of Bolivia’s Casa de Libertad in the Constitutional Capital Sucre, and honorary citizen of Potosí.

In 1964 he graduated from Dreher High School with Walker Pearce to whom he was married from 1970 until her death from multiple sclerosis in 2013. After a graduate degree from the University of South Carolina, he earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego with additional graduate work at Frankfurt University and Duke University. He worked as legislative assistant to Senator John Glenn and taught for twenty-nine years at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he held the DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Chair of Anthropology.

He now lives at Tur Hurah on the Bogd Khan Mountain in Mongolia.

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Customers find the book provides a comprehensive and researched history of money, offering a different perspective on economic history. They appreciate its readability, with one customer noting it's written in an easy-to-follow manner.

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58 customers mention "History"48 positive10 negative

Customers appreciate the book's comprehensive approach to money history, finding it well-researched and providing a different perspective on economic history.

"...1. Is a good introductory history. If you are serious about “money” do not let this be the last book you read...." Read more

"...Phase One, “Classic Cash,” traces the history of money from the first known coined currency in the western Anatolian kingdom of Lydia in 640 BC to..." Read more

"This book provides an interesting history...." Read more

"...With equal weight given to the financial, political, historical, and anthropological aspects of money throughout multiple cultures and time periods..." Read more

30 customers mention "Readability"30 positive0 negative

Customers find the book engaging and entertaining, with one mentioning it serves as a wonderful break from typical textbooks.

"...Overall I liked the book and how descriptive and detailed it went to explain the process of the development of money...." Read more

"...I came away with many new insights and an appreciation for something so mundane yet essential to our contemporary society." Read more

"...Money is at once a fantastically abstract concept (try explaining it to somebody who has never used any) and so common place that it is like water..." Read more

"...decided to buy it because I thought that it would be a great book to share with my children and to have around as a reference...." Read more

24 customers mention "Readable"20 positive4 negative

Customers find the book readable and well-written, with one customer noting it's informative without being textbook-like.

"...But if you are serious about money, this book is a fun easy read. 2. Most of the book traces a path that is familiar to economic historians...." Read more

"...or an introduction for the simply curious, this is a quick and worth-while read that will open your eyes as to the surprisingly consistent..." Read more

"...Weatherford is a good writer and storyteller...." Read more

"...book is very well researched, full of good facts and is written in an engaging manner...." Read more

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Charles W. Cotton
Money
Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2020
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

“The History of Money” by Jack Weatherford, Three Rivers Press, New York, 1997
1. Is a good introductory history. If you are serious about “money” do not let this be the last book you read. But if you are serious about money, this book is a fun easy read.
2. Most of the book traces a path that is familiar to economic historians. I did like some of the details he provided about things like Croesus, who minted the first coinage, and Arab traders in China, who deposited their gold in return for official receipts that functioned like bearer notes.
3. He might have expanded his treatment of renaissance banking and the emergence of fractional reserve banking considering the interrelationship of money to banking and banking to debt.
4. His chapter on the Spanish gold based inflation might have served as a cautionary tale for those enamored of a commodity based currency or bullionism.
5. His tales of the hyperinflation caused by irresponsible government printing of currency is an often told story. (In contrast the US mint sells currency to banks.)
6. I wish he had spent more space on Bretton Woods, considering the role that it plays in money today.
7. I would recommend his chapter on the “Cash Ghetto” to anyone, regardless of their interest in economics who is concerned about poverty.
8. Weatherford devotes the end of the book to “Electronic Money” where he observes that, “Rather than being the means for the market, money has become the market.” (page 290)
9. It was amusing to read, “The proponents of the so-called smart card hope that it will replace many of the routine cash payments that people make every day.” (page 238) Since the book was written in 1997, I wonder what Weatherford would say today.
10. I would like to have seen his treatment of the financial meltdown in 2008.
11. One thing that Weatherford can’t seem to get his mind around was the absence of a commodity basis for currency. It is hard to think that the money in the bank isn’t based on a pile of gold in a government vault somewhere; But is based rather upon the collateral that bank is financing. Many will note that overvalued collateral caused the collapse in 2008. Still, when a bank finances a new home, car, or factory the wealth of the bank has been increased by (not gold) but by a new home, car, or factory. What the system needs is an honest assessment of asset values – Remember Enron’s “mark to market” accounting – which may point to the need for more, not less regulation.
12. A related topic is when government creates money through obligational authority. Government expenditures are paid by the Treasury through book entries much as any business would do. When the government pays to create a road, build a warship, educate a child, create a vaccine, predict a storm, or many of the other non-exclusionary things that government pays for, note that the government has created more national wealth, without putting more gold in a vault.

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T. Graczewski
A fractured history of money
Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2020
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
In “The History of Money” anthropologist Jack Weatherford does exactly as promised, delivering a fast-paced, 2,600 year narrative of money.

Weatherford breaks the story into three more-or-less equal thirds. Phase One, “Classic Cash,” traces the history of money from the first known coined currency in the western Anatolian kingdom of Lydia in 640 BC to the exploitation of the silver and gold mines in the Americas by the Spanish and Portuguese beginning in the 1500s. It is the only section that reads as history in a chronological sense and it is, I think, the best one.

Weatherford argues that “Money constitutes the focal point of modern world culture” and it has done so since classical times. The coinage of the first money in Lydia unleashed a revolution in commerce that transformed the Greek world, he says. The ancient Greeks would use money to create a commercial civilization that spread to urban design, politics, religion and intellectual pursuits. “This new social network founded on commerce and money gave rise to a new political system,” he says, one based on wealth.

The Romans created “the world’s first empire organized around money … promoted the use of money and organized all of its affairs around the new commodity.” But Roman civilization failed in the long run mainly, the author suggests, because that system of money was mismanaged. Unlike Athens or Sardis, “Rome produced very little of anything nor did it serve as a major mercantile crossroads of commerce.” The city was simply an importer of wealth from its expanding empire, but conquest and pillage proved capable of financing the empire for only so long. By the reign of Trajan (98 to 117), the cost of conquest had surpassed the value of riches it brought into the empire. Meanwhile, vast sums of Roman specie flowed east to pay for a never-ending stream of luxury items. “Step by step, the imperial government took over the direct administration of the economy … Rome had become another state administered economy, an empire without money and markets.” The classical money economy collapsed not to return for another thousand years.

The Renaissance reintroduced money back into civilized society. Major advances were made in the management and measurement of money. In 1202, Leonardo Fabonacci introduced the use of Arabic numerals and in 1487 Luca Pacioli described double entry bookkeeping. Meanwhile, modern forms of banking emerged on the scene, first in the form of the Knights Templar in the 1200s and then, after the Knight’s decimation by the French King Philip IV in 1310, the northern Italian banking families led by the Medicis of Florence. “With the rise of Italian banking and the Renaissance,” Weatherford writes, “a new type of civilization began to emerge.”

It would take the massive inflow of gold and silver from the New World to complete the process. From 1500 until 1800, the mines of the Americas provided 70% of the world’s output of gold and 85% of its silver. The gold alone was valued at over $36 billion. The immediate result was a price revolution, a 400% increase in prices in mainland Europe, but also a much wider distribution of coined money than ever before. “Just as the banking revolution had increased the amount of money in circulation and brought merchants from all over Western Europe into a single commercial and financial system the increase in silver coins brought the lower classes into the system.”

Phase Two, “Paper Money,” lacks the chronological structure of the first and suffers because of it. The basic premise is that paper money has had a haphazard and contentious history. As early as the 1200s, the empire of Kublai Khan issued paper certificates in place of specie currency. However, Weatherford notes, “Neither China nor Europe became the cradle of paper money; rather, it was to be North America.” Or as John Kenneth Galbraith observed, “if the history of commercial banking belongs to the Italians and of central banking to the British, that of paper money issued by a government belongs indubitably to the Americans,” who financed their war of independence largely through printing dollars and then, during the Civil War, created the modern system of paper money through the National Bank Act of 1863.

For centuries, beginning in the early 1600s, paper currency was backed fully by gold or silver. Weatherford writes that the Bank of England introduced the first gold-backed system of paper currency and created a global financial network. Nationalized in 1946, the fate of the Bank of England was, in the author’s estimation, a major victory of politics over banking and of government over money. Indeed, “Throughout the twentieth century, the power of governments to control money grew tremendously in virtually all parts of the world.” By 1971, the powerful US dollar had been untethered from gold. The value of the American dollar, and nearly all other forms of national currency, “no longer had any independent value; it depended entirely on the people’s confidence in their political system and leaders.”

The third and final phase, according to Weatherford, is “Electronic Money.” It is the weakest of the three sections. The author asserts, somewhat surprisingly, that the invention of the ATM in 1971 was the third great revolution in money after the advent of coins 2,600 years ago and paper money 500 years ago. But then he writes that cash has become largely the domain of the poor. “In the modern two-class system, the poor pay with cash while middle-class consumers use plastic and checks.” He provides overviews of the creation of credit cards and modern currency trading, among other related topics.

Writing in the mid-1990s, it must be noted that Weatherford presciently saw the development of crypto currencies in the age of the Internet. “People will create new uses for electronic money that we cannot even imagine and that could not have been possible with the earlier forms of money … Money will never again be what it was.”

In the closing, Weatherford concludes, “The great struggle of history has been for the control over money. It is almost tautological to affirm that to control the production and distribution of money is to control the wealth, resources, and people of the world.” However, in the twenty-first century, control over money will be beyond the reach of any government or organization. In an age of free-floating currencies, including crypto currencies, with parallel and overlapping systems of money, no one will be in control; we are at the dawn of a new revolution, the Age of Money.

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JCM, Los Angeles, CA
Wealth is relative
Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2024
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Understand money; live well and without fear.

Wealth is relative.

Joke ending is: "have a rich relative"

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Travis H.
An interesting history
Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2025
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
This book provides an interesting history. However, it was written in the '90s and is not take into account the more recent advance and digital currency. It does however paint the pictures to where things are going. But is really written from the perspective of a history text as opposed to an economic text.

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Wolfgang Kasper
Money and opportunism
Reviewed in Australia on May 15, 2022
Format: KindleVerified Purchase

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.

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jonone100
A highly enjoyable romp through money's past
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 28, 2011
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
To me the cover of this book makes it look rather dry and serious. But really, its a highly enjoyable romp through money's past. I appreciate that this sounds dismissive, but its not meant to. The book does lack the intellectual depth and rigour of say, fellow anthroplogist Greaber's 'Debt - the first 5000 years', or economic historian Davies' 'A History of Money'. Nevertheless, if what Weatherford set out to do was write an engaging and readable history in 250 odd pages, then he has succeeded.

The book is divided into three parts. The first 'Classic Cash' grips you with gory detail about exchange in the ancient and medieval world. The second 'Paper Money' gives a bird's eye view of money from around the time of the reformation and through the industrial revolution. The third is 'Electronic Cash' where Weatherford brings us up to date and even speculates on the future a little.

I can't see this book being quoted in academic works, or appearing in too many bibliographies. However, bringing the history of money to a wider public is hugely important, and this book is a noble effort. If you're going to do an economics 101, or any finance related course, it'll put things in perspective for you.

I enjoyed it. And I recommend it.

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Gustavo
Excelent book
Reviewed in Spain on December 27, 2024
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Brilliant book

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Harmegnies
parfait
Reviewed in Belgium on September 4, 2023
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
correspond à mes attentes, merci

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Manfred Auer
Very good book on the history of money
Reviewed in Germany on December 25, 2019
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
One of the best books about the real history on money and everyone should read it, especially economists.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Money

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3.0 out of 5 stars Money and opportunism

5.0 out of 5 stars A highly enjoyable romp through money's past

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5.0 out of 5 stars parfait

5.0 out of 5 stars Very good book on the history of money

Money

A fractured history of money

Wealth is relative

An interesting history

Money and opportunism

A highly enjoyable romp through money's past

Excelent book

parfait

Very good book on the history of money