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Valenze Deborah, The Social Life of Money in the English Past. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2008

Jessica R. Cattelino
Affiliation:
University of Chicago

Extract

Scholars of money often take for granted its instrumentality. Deborah Valenze argues that this is a mistake, for it overlooks the historical contingency and variability in money's uses, meanings, and discourses. In this book, Valenze examines money in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, demonstrating how and when money took its “modern” social and moral form. By doing so, she opens up theoretical questions about the relationship of money to mobility and constraint, the potential of money to create hierarchy and limit freedom even while it affords new relationships and movements, and the role of money as a moral and social measure of self in everyday life. The abstracting power and the unstable meanings of money, Valenze contends, shaped early modern British culture in sometimes contradictory ways.

Type
CSSH NOTES
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History 2008

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