Oleg Komlik's short review of Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism

Money travels the modern world in disguise. It looks like a convention of human exchange – a commodity like gold or a medium like language. But its history reveals that money is a very different matter. It is an institution engineered by political communities to mark and mobilize resources. As societies change the way they create money, they change the market itself – along with the rules that structure it, the politics and ideas that shape it, and the benefits that flow from it. In Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism, Christine Desan (Harvard Law School) displays exemplary scholarship in analyzing money’s origins and scrutinizing the development of a modern monetary system and capitalism. (Open access to the introductory chapter)....

Economic Sociology and Political Economy
Money is a mode of governance in a material world of capitalism
Oleg Komlik | founder and editor-in-chief of the ES/PE, Chairman of the Junior Sociologists Network at the International Sociological Association, a PhD Candidate in Economic Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, and a Lecturer in the School of Behavioral Sciences at the College of Management Academic Studies