The Enlightenment was a time of monetary turmoil and transformation in Europe. Change began with a riot of experimentation, including novel ideas about human agency and capacity to promote economic progress, efforts to reframe divinity in terms (like the providential) compatible with market exchange,
new instruments of credit, and innovative institutions such as national banks and capital markets.
Europeans, including the settler societies in North America, improvised frantically: people faced the task of everyday exchange in changing media; governments took up the project of creating currencies that supported their political power; artists and writers raced to represent new forms of wealth and interpret the issues they raised; and intellectuals struggled to conceptualize, and tame, patterns of monetary transformation. The result was a rich debate, still unsettled, about the sources of value, the morality of the market, and the very nature of money.
Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment presents
essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the
themes of technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art
and representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.
List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Series Preface, Bill Maurer, University of California Irvine, USA Introduction: Strange New Music - The Monetary Composition Made by the Enlightenment Quartet, Christine Desan, Harvard Law School, USA 1. Money and its Technologies: Industrial Opposition and the Problem of Trust, Mara Caden, Massachusetts Historical Society, USA 2. Money and its Ideas: Enlightenment Debates about the Morality of Money, Carl Wennerlind, Columbia University, USA 3. Money, Ritual, and Religion: A Secularization Story, Dwight Codr, University of Connecticut, USA 4. Money and the Everyday: New Practices in the Enlightenment, Craig Muldrew, University of Cambridge, UK 5. Money, Art, and Representation: The Look and Sound of Money, Rebecca L. Spang, Indiana University, USA 6. Money and its Interpretation: Paper Money in Early America, Jennifer J. Baker, New York University, USA 7. Money and the Issues of the Age: Thinking about Money in the Eighteenth Century, Daniel Carey, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland Notes Bibliography Index
Christine Desan is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, USA.
