THE HISTORY OF MONEY

How money has made the world.

Religion, technology, power, and the rise and fall of entire empires are tied up with economics and commerce in McWilliams’ excellent whistle-stop tour of the way money has shaped world history. Covering centuries of innovations—from an ancient baboon femur called the Ishango Bone, possibly used for accounting, to digital-age solutions like M-Pesa, a service in Africa that turns mobile-phone credit into money—it’s a blast of a book. A former Central Bank of Ireland economist who says his peers in the field “take the fun out of money,” McWilliams is a clever and irreverent guide with a knack for turning economic concepts into easy conversation. “For economists, price is only a number,” he writes; “for real people, price is a feeling.” He takes shots at the way the elite turn up their noses at discussing money matters. “No one pretends to dislike money more than the truly posh,” he says. “Beneath the snobbery is fear,” he adds, “fear of usurpation” thanks to money’s “ability to propel social advancement.” McWilliams is skeptical of crypto, calling it “more or less an elaborate scam” that has preyed on anemic public trust in institutions. A “few tech-savvy bros issuing tokens and calling these coupons ‘currency,’” he says, “is not the future of money.” This isn’t surprising. Here is an author who is fascinated by his subject, who holds it in esteem and sees it as second to only fire as “the crucial technology” shaping humanity for the past 5,000 years. Money emerges in the book as something almost miraculous: the connective tissue between cultures, the oxygen for innovation. It’s “a kind of magic,” McWilliams says, “motivating people to strive, to innovate, and ultimately to change their own personal circumstances and thereby change the world.” Early in the book he claims: “Money was the first thing we wrote about.” In McWilliams’ hands, it’s wonderful to read about.

An absolute romp through history, with money—its uses and misuses—as the throughline.