Read more
The Enlightenment was a time of monetary turmoil and transformation in Europe. Change began with a riot of experimentation, including novel ideas about human agency and capacity to promote economic progress, efforts to reframe divinity in terms (like the providential) compatible with market exchange, new instruments of credit, and innovative institutions such as national banks and capital markets. Europeans, including the settler societies in North America, improvised frantically: people faced the task of everyday exchange in changing media; governments took up the project of creating currencies that supported their political power; artists and writers raced to represent new forms of wealth and interpret the issues they raised; and intellectuals struggled to conceptualize, and tame, patterns of monetary transformation. The result was a rich debate, still unsettled, about the sources of value, the morality of the market, and the very nature of money.
Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources,
A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Series Preface, Bill Maurer, University of California Irvine, USA
Introduction: Strange New Music - The Monetary Composition Made by the Enlightenment Quartet, Christine Desan, Harvard Law School, USA
1. Money and its Technologies: Industrial Opposition and the Problem of Trust, Mara Caden, Massachusetts Historical Society, USA
2. Money and its Ideas: Enlightenment Debates about the Morality of Money, Carl Wennerlind, Columbia University, USA
3. Money, Ritual, and Religion: A Secularization Story, Dwight Codr, University of Connecticut, USA
4. Money and the Everyday: New Practices in the Enlightenment, Craig Muldrew, University of Cambridge, UK
5. Money, Art, and Representation: The Look and Sound of Money, Rebecca L. Spang, Indiana University, USA
6. Money and its Interpretation: Paper Money in Early America, Jennifer J. Baker, New York University, USA
7. Money and the Issues of the Age: Thinking about Money in the Eighteenth Century, Daniel Carey, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Christine Desan is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, USA.Christine Desan is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, USA.Bill Maurer is Dean of the School of Social Sciences; Professor of Anthropology, Law and Criminology, Law and Society; and the Director of the Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He is the author of Pious Property: Islamic Mortgages in the United States and Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason.
Summary
The Enlightenment was a time of monetary turmoil and transformation in Europe. Change began with a riot of experimentation, including novel ideas about human agency and capacity to promote economic progress, efforts to reframe divinity in terms (like the providential) compatible with market exchange, new instruments of credit, and innovative institutions such as national banks and capital markets. Europeans, including the settler societies in North America, improvised frantically: people faced the task of everyday exchange in changing media; governments took up the project of creating currencies that supported their political power; artists and writers raced to represent new forms of wealth and interpret the issues they raised; and intellectuals struggled to conceptualize, and tame, patterns of monetary transformation. The result was a rich debate, still unsettled, about the sources of value, the morality of the market, and the very nature of money.
Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.
Foreword
A thematic overview of the role and impact of money on society and culture in the era of the Enlightenment.
