This contribution surveys the essays in political economy that Hume began to publish in 1752, with particular attention to his thinking about money. The essays are presented as, in part, extensions of the natural history of property and government that Hume began to sketch in A Treatise of Human Nature. But they were also carefully calibrated interventions in the political discourse of trade and finance prominent in British politics since the seventeenth century. Hume’s political economy can be situated in a range of British and European intellectual and political contexts. This chapter pays particular attention to his recurrent engagement with John Locke’s extensive writings on money, trade and taxation, which served Hume as a foil in developing his own positions. There is, it will be suggested, a deep connection between Hume’s celebrated critique of Locke’s account of the original contract and his rejection of Locke’s search for an invariable monetary standard.

Building upon the significant role that cash books and other written documents play in Fijian fundraising events, this chapter traces formal bookkeeping back to colonial taxation and the way it once sought to individuate indigenous Fijians through particular kinds of taxes. In the final analysis, the accountability found in bookkeeping does not make Fijians the economically liberated individuals imagined by early-twentieth century colonial administration. Instead, bookkeeping has come to signify a formal accountability to one’s home community. Analysing this mode of accountability offers a way to foreground the egalitarian ideology informing the formalities of fundraising.

This chapter explores how taxes shape the meaning of other payments and money flows in highland Bolivia. The concept ‘ecology of payments’ is introduced to describe the world of payments amongst the so-called informally employed in the city of Cochabamba. It explores how, for instance, receipts for commercial licence taxes and property taxes paid provide people with the right to make other kinds of payments, such as fees to local neighbourhood associations and unions. An ‘ecology of payments’ pays attention to the multiple links and dependencies between payments and the way they transform each other. This approach encourages a focus on the local impact of taxes paid, as opposed to the effect of taxes on long-term state–society relations. To ascertain the role of taxes within this ecology, the chapter also aims to understand how the concept of formality informs the power and character of different payments.

Challenging the myth of non-return, this chapter shows that, by the 1970s, many guest workers did want to return to Turkey. But instead of support, they encountered opposition from the Turkish government. In the 1970s, the link between return migration and financial investments dominated bilateral discussions between Turkey and West Germany. After the Oil Crisis, West Germany devised bilateral policies to promote remigration. Turkey, then mired in unemployment, hyperinflation, and debt, actively resisted those efforts. The Turkish government realized that guest workers played a significant role in mitigating the country’s economic crisis. To repay its foreign debt, Turkey needed guest workers’ remittance payments in high-performing Deutschmarks. If guest workers returned to Turkey, then that stream would dry up. Turkish officials thus strove to prevent mass return migration at all costs – even when it contradicted guest workers’ interests. These tensions also manifested in Turkey’s charging of exorbitant fees for citizens abroad who sought exemptions from mandatory military service, prompting young migrants to create an activist organization that critiqued this policy. The knowledge that they were unwanted in both countries widened the rift between the migrants and their home country, which disparaged them as “Germanized” yet relied on them as “remittance machines.”

Rarely accorded the economic perspicacity of his contemporary and sometime antagonist Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift nevertheless offers his readers a clear vision of the rise of finance in Britain and Ireland during the first decades of the eighteenth century. This chapter opens with a section outlining the Financial Revolution of the late seventeenth century. The second section looks into Swift’s private finances and his interest in material wealth. The third section focuses on Swift’s responses to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. And the fourth and final section focuses on the Wood’s Halfpence controversy of 1722–24, which provoked Swift’s most concentrated period of economic writing.

Wagner and money is a cantus firmus of his biography. Notoriously broke, he is often regarded as a ‘pump genius’. He always demanded financial generosity from anyone who wanted to call themselves his friend. His pre-March criticism of capitalism has its origins in his completely underdeveloped economic mind. In King Ludwig II of Bavaria, he gained his most powerful and significant patron from 1864 onwards. But contrary to the widespread prejudice, it was by no means excessive sums that the king spent on Wagner. Moreover, in times without copyright and regulated royalty payments, artists were always dependent on patrons and gainful employment. Under today’s legal conditions, Wagner would have been a millionaire.

This chapter describes the key changes in terms of money, credit and banking in the 1000 to 1500 period within the various kingdoms. It highlights how after a period of late monetization, each Christian kingdom transitioned to centralized models that were well-articulated with their European counterparts while keeping important distinctive traits. Nevertheless, the demand for means of payment on behalf of kings, merchants and other agents stimulated the development of credit. The need for credit spanned the entire Peninsula and the urban/rural divide. Thus, all countries saw the emergence of lively credit markets for (mostly private) borrowers, buttressed by functioning courts and regulations. These markets involved both specialists and non-specialists, but it was only in the Crown of Aragon where financial agents transitioned to institutionalized banks.

Chapter 1 uses the Middle English Charters of Christ to outline a medieval theory of money as debt. The charter lyrics pretend to be deeds, grants, or writs by which Christ cancels the debt owed to God by sinners, or, alternatively, bequeaths the kingdom of heaven to the faithful. In exchange for the remission or the inheritance, the charter stipulates that humankind owes a “rent” to Christ of love and the regular observance of the sacrament of penance. The form of the charter lyrics imitates the form of legal documents, using the verbal formulae and visual markers designed to ensure legal and documentary authenticity as a kind of spiritual guarantee: the lyrics are sincere forgeries. I argue that the kind of belief at work in this act of forgery is a monetary belief. The lyrics function as close analogues to money in that they measure debt and depend for their value on the creditor’s right to repayment. At the same time, like money, they depend for their operation on the community’s active willingness to participate in a shared fiction.

This chapter introduces the study, setting, argument, and plan of progression of Bankrolling Empire. In particular, I introduce the Jhaveri family of Ahmedabad and identify how the Mughal state provided new opportunities and challenges for the family by the early seventeenth century. The reader is left with the idea that traditional explanations of Mughal collapse such as bigotry of emperors, superior fighting power of rival warlords, and communal distrust between Muslim rulers and Hindu subjects are not adequate. Instead, I suggest financial crises were the chief cause that tipped Mughal administration beyond recovery. Such transformations in state and locality in Mughal Gujarat are highlighted by focusing on four generations of a remarkable business family, the Jhaveris of Ahmedabad, and their relations with political elites. The Jhaveris were deeply involved in political intrigue, courtly life, and the finances of Mughal officials and their rivals across two centuries.

Returning to the Jhaveri family, Chapter 5 explores the climax of full-blown antagonism between key financial agents and sources of Mughal authority in what I am calling a phase of expedient extortion. I focus on the life and activities of Khushalchand (1680–1748), a third generation Jhaveri brought into the whirlwind of financing gubernatorial rivalries to the point of being violently extorted and forced into exile. In contrast to his forefathers, whose personal security was safeguarded and whose loans were repaid, Khushalchand experienced grotesque violence at the hands of Mughal officials. As a reaction and response, he sought protection by gambling capital on political futures. Given that multiple groups were vying for power as the Mughal state atrophied, Khushalchand reoriented his business towards raising finance for political elites, and brokered deals between armed groups who aspired control of Ahmedabad and its environs. In the process, he faced both criticism and praise from local residents and members of the business fraternity.

Chapter 1, a prelude, provides necessary background about the Mughal Empire, and details about its conquest of Gujarat beginning in 1572. Standard histories portray conquest as swift and decisive. The picture I present is somewhat different. Akbar’s annexation of Gujarat was a slow and protracted effort requiring the astute balancing of military force and the pacification and absorption of local political elites into Mughal administration. A successful campaign, as we shall see, absorbed local elites into the Mughal idiom of hierarchy, privileges, duties, and system of wealth distribution. The arranging of tribute payments and indemnities was a core feature of this system. Money over the course of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries became central to Mughal political dispensation. This background chapter concludes by laying out key opportunities Mughal rule provided for the Jhaveri family as they built their influence.