Introducing Money

Mark Peacock offers a historical and theoretical account of how money came into being. Rather than tracing money back to barter and market trade, as most economic accounts do, he looks at the social, political, legal and religious forces that shaped it. His method holds that any serious study of money must draw on history, and he sets out a 'state theory of money' as an alternative to the conventional account of its origins.

To test these ideas, the book examines several historical settings: ancient Greece, the currencies introduced in British colonial territories during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and present-day local communities that create their own 'alternative' currencies.

Peacock's central claim is that money is not mainly an economic phenomenon tied to market exchange. He argues that it nonetheless has far-reaching effects on societies and on how people think and act, with economic consequences among many others.