100 books like War and Gold

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.”

This book made me want to study with Lynn Hunt. 

Divided into “The Poetics of Power” and “The Sociology of Politics,” the better known first half explores rhetoric, symbolic forms of political practice, and imagery in novel ways that have influenced both my scholarship and my teaching. 

But I was even more struck by the second part where Hunt considered the backgrounds, age, occupations, and experience of Revolutionary political actors in four French cities as a way to understand the political geography of the Revolution, networks, culture brokers, and the emergence of a new political class. 

This approach shaped my dissertation and first book, but, more importantly it made me think about the link among and between cultural influences, socio-economic backgrounds, and the lived experience to understand the French Revolution.

This book also strives to capture the harsh working conditions and rugged individuals who must endure such endeavors, as well as the greed that often can push those in management positions to take risks for profit that might put others in danger. While this book paints with a broad brush, it does very well at telling a story about blue collar heroes, greedy villains, and the price of hubris in the form of a hungry beast.

On one level, this is a book about housework in the pre-Civil War northern United States. Much more profoundly, it shatters ideas about unpaid labor in early industrial capitalism. It completely changed my—and many readers’—ideas of what constitutes “work,” what it means to contribute to a household economy, and how ideas about wages (and, especially, work done by men outside the home) obscured early capitalists’ dependence on women’s unwaged work. After reading this, you’ll never refer to “women who worked” and “women who didn’t” again.  It should be essential reading not only for women’s historians, but for anyone interested in ideologies of labor, capitalism, and the history of work.

[Full disclosure: I met Jeanne Boydston on my second day of graduate school and we collaborated closely on our dissertations (later books). She was my best friend and best teacher until her much-too-early death in 2008.]