In an age when authoritative definitions of currency were in flux and small change was scarce, money enjoyed a rich and complex social life. Deborah Valenze shows how money became involved in relations between people in ways that moved beyond what we understand as its purely economic functions. This highly original investigation covers the formative period of commercial and financial development in England between 1630 and 1800. In a series of interwoven essays, Valenze examines religious prohibitions related to avarice, early theories of political economy and exchange practices of the Atlantic economy. In applying monetary measurements to women, servants, colonial migrants, and local vagrants, this era was distinctive in its willingness to blur boundaries between people and things. Lucid and highly readable, the book revises the way we see the advance of commercial society at the threshold of modern capitalism.
• Innovative treatment of the subject of money • Pioneers a new field of research at the intersection of several disciplines (economics, history, literature, anthropology, sociology) • Of interest to historians of all periods
Contents
List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; Abbreviations; Introduction: the social life of money, c. 1640–1770; Part I. The Relationship Between Money and Persons: 1. Coins of the realm: the development of a demotic sense of money; 2. The phantasm of money: the animation of exchange media in England, c. 1600–1770; Part II. Mutable Meanings of Money, ca. 1640–1730: 3. Circulating mammon: attributes of money in early modern English culture; 4. Refuge from money's mischief: John Bellers and the Clerkenwell Workhouse; 5. Quarrels over money: The determination of an acquisitive self in the early eighteenth century; Part III. Regulating People Through Money: 6. The measure of money: equivalents of personal value in English law; 7. The price of people: rethinking money and power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; 8. Money makes masteries: the triumph of the monetary self in the long eighteenth century.
Reviews
'Deborah Valenze's extraordinarily original The Social Life of Money in the English Past removes the history of money from the economists and inserts it into the lives of people who cannot quite understand it but find they have to live by it. The issues it raises go well beyond eighteenth-century Britain.' The Guardian
'Using personal letters, diary entries, pamphlets, allegorical tales, poems, plays, and visual art, the Social Life of Money is seen from a variety of perspectives. Anthropological, literary, feminist, and social theories are firmly integrated into a dense analysis of social change in early modern England.' Literature and History
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