100 books like Freaks of Fortune

I love the way this book makes the very old story of the French Revolution new and exciting by telling the parallel story of how so much of the turmoil of that period was etched onto the money that a succession of governments issued.

I learned so much, both from the shifting set of images on French money and the wonderful stories about how a confused populace used this money to the best of their ability, as their paper currency lost both the crowned heads that once adorned it and, in the process, much of its value. Spang ingeniously recounts the revolutionaries’ efforts to paper over a failing revolution with vacuous promises to pay. 

I remember traveling in Europe as a teenager in the early 1980s, before ATMs and euros, when American Express traveler’s checks allowed me to pay for room and board across a succession of sovereign states.

Booker ends his book where I started my personal monetary journey, telling the fascinating history of how (mostly British) tourists paid their way across Europe and North America, using such strange devices as circular notes and early incarnations of the traveler’s check. The book includes numerous color plates of these pieces of paper, issued by Thomas Cook, Lloyds Bank, and even American Express! I also learned about how far the pound sterling counted as a coin of the world and not just a coin of the realm (answer: not as far as I thought!).

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 on its redemptive capacity and shifted their chagrin from money itself to its abuse. Money, she argues, became a measure of status, a judicial incentive (in the form of rewards for wanted criminals), and a vehicle of philanthropy–emerging, alongside the Enlightenment, as “a universal instrument of personal agency.”

When I got wind of this book, I had just finished writing a book about gold and money in Britain from the 1750s to the 1850s. Although I knew about the long history of British money prior to the 1750s and also about its complicated history down to the present, I jumped at the chance to read the whole story laid out between two covers. Blaazer deftly accomplishes this task, with a special focus on the strikingly different paths that money took in Britain’s three corners of Ireland, Scotland, and England (not so much on Wales, as is so often the case in such histories!).

How a country manages its money, it turns out, says much about how it governs its people—ranging from willful indifference in Ireland to consistent policies in England and Scotland that favored the wealthy (and especially the bankers) over the middling classes. A final advantage of… show more.

I really loved this book!

Desan’s work filled multiple gaps in my knowledge regarding the historical circumstances that contributed to modern money.

In my view, it is the best and most comprehensive book for anyone who wants to know how we arrived at current monetary arrangements. The research and writing are masterful, comprehensive, and there are many ‘oh my, I didn’t know that’ moments. 

A real eye-opener and an essential read for anyone interested in money, finance, and the emergence of capitalism.

Easily the best and most authoritative book since Dickson’s The Financial Revolution In England – a must-read!

Though sometimes described as a “textbook,” this authoritative, lucidly written, and altogether reliable synthesis—covering much of Europe—is actually a fine way to learn about the guild masters who dominated pre-industrial labor. Their paradoxical condition comes through clearly: employers and employees, they were at once seamlessly integrated into the social hierarchy and ruthlessly exclusionary toward outsiders. They touted a timeless, divinely sanctioned order, while also being true wheelers and dealers for their own honor and interests, leading to levels of entrepreneurship and inequality amongst their own ranks that would surprise many.

The book that gave birth to the slogan... This is an iconoclastic look at the capitalist economy from a man who trained as an academic economist and worked for the National Coal Board. Schumacher thought creatively and wrote and spoke in a lively and engaging way and the book is an accessible introduction to a different way of thinking about what the purpose of an economy, or economics, is.

Also, Schumacher was invited to become the first Director of the Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society, but felt that he was already too old for the job. Many years later, I became the Foundation’s last Director.

Though not bursting with colorful anecdotes, this book is absolutely authoritative, and along with the author’s journal articles, it transformed our understanding of medieval life in at least three ways. It showed how pervasive the monetary exchange of goods and services was in the so-called age of feudalism. It demonstrated the importance of informal modes of exchange, away from the publicly visible formal markets. And it went far toward clarifying how, when, and for what purpose monetary exchange took place in a society dominated by vertical bonds of personal loyalty and reciprocity.

Jeffrey Sklansky is that rare academic with a writer’s literary imagination, which serves the reader well in engaging The Soul’s Economy, a riveting and dense intellectual history of the market’s emergence as the organizing principle of not only economic life, but of a distinctly new moral sensibility between 1820 and 1920. 

Sklansky explores this far-reaching turn of events through a series of dedicated readings of America’s leading philosophers and pundits of the times, ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to John Dewey, who collectively recast the pursuit of wealth into an ethic of personal rectitude and even the source of society’s general welfare.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1990s saw the model of democratic capitalism prevail. Thirty years later, democracy is being questioned, and capitalism has been threatened by growing inequality.

Martin Wolf’s book provides a deep study of the underlying causes of this worrying development, something I very much appreciate. For all its flaws, Wolf argues that democratic capitalism remains the most promising economic model to provide individual freedom and shared prosperity, but it will require a revisiting of the concept of citizenship to foster a shared belief in the common good.