Recall This Book

108* Chris Desan on Making Money (Recall This Buck)

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Our Recall this Buck series, back in 2020 and 2021, explored the history of money, ranging from the earliest forms of labor IOUs to the modern world of bitcoin and electronically distributed value. We began by focusing on the rise of capitalism, the Bank of England, and how an explosion of liquidity changed everything.

We were lucky to do so, just before the Pandemic struck, with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School, who recently published Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is also managing editor of JustMoney.org, a website that explores money as a critical site of governance. Desan’s research explores money as a legal and political project. Her approach opens economic orthodoxy to question by widening the focus on money as an instrument, to examine the institutions and agreements through which resources are mobilized and tracked, by means of money. In doing so, she shows that particular forms of money, and the markets within which they circulate, are neither natural or inevitable.

  • Christine Desan, “Making Money“
  • Ursula Le Guin The Earthsea Novels (money hard to come by, but kinda cute)
  • Samuel Delany, the Neveryon series (money part of the evils of naming, slavery, labor appropriation)
  • Jane Austen “Pride and Prejudice“
  • Richard Rhodes, “Energy“
  • John Plotz, “Is Realism Failing?” (on liberal guilt and patrimonial fiction)
  • William Cobbett, “Rural Rides” (1830; London as wen)
  • E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” (notional “just price” of bread)
  • Peter Brown, “Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD”
  • Chris Vanden Bossche, “Reform Acts“
  • “Sanditon” on PBS (and the original unfinished Austen novel)
  • Still from “Sanditon”
  • Margot Finn, “Character of Credit“
  • Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the 21st Century“
  • L. Frank Baum, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (1900)
  • Leo Tolstoy “The Forged Coupon” (orig.1904)
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Bottle Imp” (1891)
  • Frank Norris, “The Octopus” (1901)
  • D. W. Griffith, “A Corner in Wheat” (1909)


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    Recall This BookBy Elizabeth Ferry and John Plotz
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