The Role of Money in Economic History

Extract

The role money has played, and still plays, in the evolution of social organization and individual behavior remains a dark area though some corners besides price history have been studied intensively. You know better than I how much has been written by anthropologists, numismatists, and historians about such matters as the different forms of money men have used, the evolution of coinage, the relation of gifts and piracy to the rise of regular trade and organized markets, the commutation of dues in kind and services into money payments, the transformation of an agricultural peasantry into an industrial proletariat, the changing methods of governmental finance in war and peace, the development of credit and banking, the spread of bookkeeping and its refinement into accounting, the diverse forms of business enterprises, and the interrelations between making goods and making money. Some of the monographs I have read upon these and related topics are admirable pieces of work. But monographs are flashlights; they do not give general illumination. What we do not yet have, what we need, and what economic historians should supply is a coherent story of how monetary forms have infiltrated one human relation after another, and their effects upon men's practices and habits of thought. I am well aware that the spadework desirable for this job is far from completed; but even now wellequipped students could draw an authentic sketch of the process as a whole. By so doing they would both stimulate detailed research and enlighten the thinking of all who are concerned with social organization, past and present.