Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible Paperback – August 15, 2017 by William N Goetzmann (Princeton University Press) by the Bard of Bat Yam (#BardOfBatYam), Poet Laureate Of Zion and Stephen Darori (@stephendarori, #stephendarori)

There are so many books covering the history of money that it helps to begin by categorizing them by the authors' fields of interests and political views.

For example, one of the best is David Graeber's Debt. The author is an anthropologist and anarchist who argues money is debt, and debt leads to war, slavery, political repression and other violence. History: The Human Gamble is Reuven Brenner's metaphysical account of financial history, leading to a libertarian view. Another excellent entry is Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, written by a historian and champion of the liberating and progressive effects of finance. In Money, Felix Martin considers money from a political view and argues for a center-left/Democratic socialist/Keynesian-economy-managed-by-professional-economists world. Franklin Allen and Glenn Yago use linguistic evidence and an evolutionary perspective in Financing the Future. They would like to see a lot of financial innovations. There are plenty of others, treating most of the same evidence and events, but from perspectives as different as the blind men and the elephants, and coming to radically different conclusions.

Money Changes Everything is archaeological at its core. The main attention is on physical money and documents. This will not surprise readers familiar with his earlier book, The Origins of Value, which is an anthology distinguished by gorgeous photographs of monetary artifacts. It is narrower than the other books, nearly all the attention is on ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome and China; and medieval to early modern Europe. The focus is clearly related to the amount of surviving physical evidence for exchange systems. The book is the least political of the monetary histories I am familiar with, it seems to have a mild center-right perspective generally supportive of the force of finance, but sympathetic to light regulation.

I think this book is most useful as a counterweight to all the enthusiastic theorizing and argument in the field. Many of the documents and artifacts described don't fit neatly into anyone's theories. Any reasonably clever writer can cherrypick historical evidence and employ rhetorical sleight of hand to promote persuasive theories. But as John Adams put it, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." That's not to say that the books above are wrong, just that considering their arguments in light of the evidence in this book can lead to more nuanced, and likely more accurate, views.

On the negative side, facts are duller than speculation, and this book is particularly dry. The author's passion is clearly to handle the physical remnants of history, which is less exciting than proposing bold hypotheses about the sweep of human events. He graciously praises every single researcher cited, in the text, not footnotes. That's really nice, but it starts wearing thin for readers.

I recommend this book highly for anyone seriously interested in the history of money and finance. I can't promise you a good time or deep insights, but I think it will challenge your views and make them better. Without the serious interest in the field, I don't think you'll make it far into this long, dense, plodding (but useful) book.