Why read The Social Life of Money in the English Past?

Book cover of The Social Life of Money in the English Past

Book description

In an age when authoritative definitions of currency were in flux and small change was scarce, money enjoyed a rich and complex social life. Deborah Valenze shows how money became involved in relations between people in ways that moved beyond what we understand as its purely economic functions. This highly…

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European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Social Life of Money in the English Past as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Timothy Alborn

Author

Before Valenze published this book, she had mostly written about people—religious visionaries, working-class women, and the like. Since this book appeared in 2006, she has focused on things—specifically milk and, as seen through the eyes of Thomas Malthus, the food that sustains populations.

This book is where these two foci meet, and the book has deeply informed my own work on money and the way I teach British history to my students. My main takeaway from the book is Valenze’s claim that Britain “detoxified” money toward the end of the eighteenth century. Around this time, moralists found cause to focus…

From Timothy's list on the strangeness of money.