100 books like Making Money

I would argue that the history of capitalism is also the history of money.  You can’t understand one without the other. 

The Currency of Empire is masterfully written and researched.

Why I loved this book so much is not only because it filled many gaps in my knowledge of the history of money in the United States, but also that it has a keen focus on political power and the different interests among the colonists and England. 

If you want to understand how money and monetary systems are created within relations of power this book is essential for you. Another must-read that should not be missed.

Gold has fascinated humanity for a considerable swathe of history, and it continues to do so today.

I saw this book online and immediately had to get it. I already knew that the creation of modern money as debt was fundamentally rooted in war and geopolitics, but I did not know the extensive history of how gold and war were interconnected over 500 years. 

I think that this is a captivating study for anyone who is interested in the links between war, gold, and geopolitical capitalism. 

A fascinating and essential read for explaining how we arrived at where we are today. 

This book was a real eye-opener and can be considered seminal across the social sciences for its breadth and depth of analysis on money. 

I loved this book because it filled so many gaps in my knowledge. I was drawn to it because I once asked my professor how new money was generated and he said he knew but he forgot. 

This made me think that money might not be all that important to understanding capitalism. Alas, I was dead wrong of course and returned to my question years later.

That’s how I found Professor Ingham’s book. I still have comprehensive notes from his work and consult them regularly. 

This book is essential for anyone who wants to understand the past and present of money. 

I love this book because it was a real eye-opener on par with Ingham’s work. 

I discovered the book when I was researching my book with Richard Robbins. In my view it is a foundational book that should be read by all those interested in money, debt, and capitalism. 

I really like Rowbotham’s analysis and cutting critique of the current monetary system. He begins the book by asking: if virtually every nation in the world is in debt, who is the money owed to? 

From there the adventure begins as he unravels how modern money is created. If you thought that when you borrowed from a bank you were borrowing the money of other depositors, think again! 

A wonderful read that will get you thinking about alternatives to a capitalism founded on debt money. 

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.

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.”

Wide-ranging philosophical conversation and moral critique of capitalism as an instituted social order wherein a structure of domination establishes and reinforces an entire way of life attuned to the hegemony of exchange value as well as commodity production, and their social reproduction.

I very much appreciate the book’s strategy of cogent, accessible and explorative dialogue rather than tit-for-tat debate.

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.

This book, originally published in 1960, is the classical statement of the still dominant position in economic history, which assumes that economic growth is natural and which I have proven wrong.

I recommend it to anyone interested in the current (unchanging for decades) state of the discipline as an essential model of what I was arguing against.

Although this book is ostensibly about risk, none of Levy’s fascinating case studies stray far from money. Indeed, one of his central claims is that modern capitalism transforms risk into a financial calculation, whereby money’s fluid nature can be employed to divert uncertainty in different directions. Although the goal in such transactions is always to contain risk, the reality (as brilliantly recounted by Levy) is far less certain.

I read this book immediately after writing about the history of British life insurance, and most of these cases (about insuring slave ships, African-American savings, farm mortgages, and the stock market, among others) reinforced the lessons I had learned about the Quixotic and hubristic nature of risk management. The upshot of the book is that, over the course of America’s long nineteenth century, the rich got richer, and the poor got empty promises. Its brilliance lies in the relish with which Levy… show more.