William Goetzmann’s [amazon_link id=”0691143781″ target=”_blank” ]Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible[/amazon_link] is exactly the kind of book I find relaxing to read before going to sleep. Apart from the fact that it’s too chunky to carry around, it is a panoramic historical sweep packed with interesting nuggets.

[amazon_image id=”0691143781″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible[/amazon_image]

Money is hardly my Mastermind special subject, and I certainly don’t get emotional about it as so many commentators do. So I have no view about the criticism of the book by people like this reviewer, whose point seems to be that Goetzmann doesn’t agree with every word of David Graeber’s [amazon_link id=”1612194192″ target=”_blank” ]Debt[/amazon_link] . I’m certainly not going to opine about pre-history. However, Goetzmann is making a far more general argument, rather than a specific case about the role of debt in ancient society (& anyway I think that particular dyspeptic reviewer significantly misrepresents the book’s argument).

Goetzmann’s point is that there is an intimate inter-relationship between financial arrangements and instruments and other economic and social institutions. Indeed, he argues that this is causal and financial innovations made ‘civilisation’ (in the sense of social and political changes observed through history) possible. Intellectual innovations like writing or probability theory, and social innovations like the intermediation of individual savings into investment at scale, were driven by finance. Of course, the causality runs the other way round too: certain economic and social institutions were necessary for financial innovations to occur. “The joint development of financial tools and complex society was a process of give and take on many levels.” It’s complicated, folks! Simple accounts are probably wrong.

Goetzmann is certainly not a financial determinist. He writes: “Necessity is the mother of invention. … Financial technology is redundant, adaptive, and sometimes mercurial. The institutions we take to be sacrosanct, inevitable and indispensable probably are not. Given the random outcome of historical events, another set of institutions might have emerged to serve the same financial problems. Financial innovation is thus a series of accidents of history – the caprice of time, location and opportunity.” This seems absolutely convincing to me, rather than any Graeber-like projection of ideology onto the past. And – as Goetzmann notes – “In times of financial crises, society has tended to express a collective nostalgia for a pre-financial world.”

The book is broadly chronological, starting in ancient Mesopotamia, visiting China, mediaeval Europe, 18th century France and western Europe, back via Marx to China, then the 1920s, Keynes and the war, and a final short section on modern finance. There are all kinds of examples I didn’t know about – the Templars as bankers, the early example of corporate structure in the shape of Toulouse’s Honor del Bazacle. Like Jared Diamond through a different lens, Goetzmann sees the fragmentation and political competition of western Europe in mediaeval and early modern times as an important contribution to its subsequent reliance on capital markets. All very enjoyable, and I’d say essential for anyone interested in financial history.

Today I finished reading properly Rebecca Spang’s marvellous [amazon_link id=”0674047036″ target=”_blank” ]Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution[/amazon_link], having only dipped in when I first bought it. It really repays the attention. What seems to be a book about a specific aspect of the historical episode is really a reflection on the nature of money and its intrinsic relationship with politics and with conceptions of property. Set in the 1780s and 90s, it could not be more relevant to the bitcoin/ledger debate.

[amazon_image id=”0674047036″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution[/amazon_image]

I learnt much from it, starting with the insight that the problems with the infamous assignats issued after the revolution stemmed from the unquestioned belief that the venal offices sold by the old regime, raising much government revenue, could not be cancelled or expropriated. Spang writes: “Throughout the debate, no one (not even Marat or Robespierre) took the truly revolutionary position of suggesting venal offices might be illegitimate privileges that could be cancelled without payment.” But, she adds, “Simply aboloshing the offices was unthinkable but so too was leaving the debt on the books, since officeholders who had not been repaid woulf retain their property and ‘privilege’ would still exist.” Settling the debts in one go would would consign the ancien regime to history and complete the revolution. Hence the issue of assignats backed by the expropriated land of the church.

The book also has a fascinating section on [amazon_link id=”0691116350″ target=”_blank” ]The Big Problem of Small Change[/amazon_link] (to quote the title of Tom Sargent and François Velde’s book on this): the cost of manufacturing the low-denomination coins used by most people exceeded their face value. A shortage of usable cash led to the proliferation of private currencies in many areas, and eventually their replacement by breaking up the assignats into smaller denominations, so that they morphed from something like bills of exchange, backed by specific property, into generic paper money. A sophisticated credit network built on personal relationships and specificities gave way to anonymity and ultimately distrust. But the distrust was the product of political uncertainty, the dissolution of everything familiar and the clear invalidation of the assumption that the future would be enough like the present that credit – and money – could be relied on.

[amazon_link id=”B00RLHMOF4″ target=”_blank” ]The book[/amazon_link] concludes with a reminder that the past is different from the present but what it does serve to underline is the culturally specific character of not only money but other foundation stones of economic relationships – property and value. These “have never been naturally given categories but are historically produced.” And, perhaps, poised for another revolution, as digital everything continues to strain conventional ideas of property and value to breaking point and beyond.