A History of Money

"This is one of my absolutely favourite books. Many years ago, when I worked on Mondex in Swindon, I very quickly realized, being an intelligent person, that actually this whole money thing was much more interesting than I’d realized. And, what’s more, as soon as you’re forced to sit down and write some computer code for it you realize nobody understands it. So, I wanted to understand a bit more about it and its history. And I went out and bought this book and it is just wonderful. I read it like a novel , wanting to know what’s going to happen next. I love the whole thing. It’s beautifully written and really interesting. There are many others I could point to now. There’s Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Cash . There’s Money Changes Everything by William Goetzmann. But this one still holds its own. When I was younger, I organised a conference about digital money. And I called up Glyn Davies, who didn’t know me from Adam, and asked if he would come and give a talk to set the historical context. He very kindly came along and delivered a fabulous talk about the history of money. I just love that book. It’s terrific. He is sadly no longer with us. It was first published in 1994. Yes. The overarching theme of it is that every innovation in the history of money has served to lessen centralized control. And the last great evolution involved the settlement between the monarch and the merchant classes, which led to central banking and national currencies and all that sort of thing. And that’s the future. Future technological developments will continue to lessen central control. I think you can make the argument that it has already happened. The question is whether it is going to be decentralized yet further and the answer to that, I think, is probably ‘yes’. In any case, I don’t think you can think about the future of money if you don’t understand where it came from and how it has worked in the past. And Davies is great in providing that perspective."