Review of Money by David McWilliams – A tale of cold hard cash | Economics

MaSecrets, or the lack thereof, were at the heart of Victorian fiction. Think of Mr Micawber in David Copperfield, in debtors’ prison, waiting to be discovered. Or Augustus Melmotte, the financier in Trollope’s How We Live. The stories always involved wills, heir dowries and the collapse of get-rich-quick Ponzi schemes. Novelists of the time knew how to keep their readers hooked.

By contrast, popular non-fiction books about money are something of a rarity. John Maynard Keynes’s masterpiece, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, is like James Joyce’s Ulysses: only a small percentage of people who start it finish it. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations falls into the same category, as does Thomas Piketty’s recent surprise bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Economics books are rarely page-turners, but that’s mainly because most economists aren’t big on style.

David McWilliams’ attempt to tell the history of the world through the medium of money, from 18,000 BC to the present day, is commendable. The author boldly claims that the story of money is the history of humanity itself. “Writing came about because of another breakthrough technology: money. Money was the first thing we wrote about,” he says.

The arguments are not entirely convincing, but McWilliams, a former economist at the Central Bank of Ireland, knows how to write. His book is well researched and full of anecdotes that bring a bland subject to life. Some are familiar enough; no book on money would be complete without mentioning the Dutch Tulip Mania of the 1630s or the South Sea Bubble of 1720. Other stories are more surprising, such as the fact that Darwin’s theory of evolution was inspired not by a biology treatise but an economic one: Thomas Malthus’s work on population. It was also new to me to see The Wizard of Oz as an allegory for the struggle between Midwestern American populists and East Coast financial elites in the 1890s. Hitler’s plan to destroy the British economy by airdropping counterfeit money made by concentration camp prisoners is well told.

The story moves along at a good clip, although some of the historical references, from King Midas and his golden hand to Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, feel a little contrived. There’s a lengthy chapter on the trial and execution of Sir Roger Casement, who was hanged for treason during World War I, but its relevance isn’t immediately clear. Joyce’s role in the founding of Dublin’s first cinema also seems an unnecessary diversion from the book’s central theme.

Other criticisms are a bit nit-picky. An interesting passage on the modernist revolution in art and literature could have been expanded beyond a light touch on the modernist revolution in economics pioneered by Keynes in the 1930s. The section on how commercial banks create money is hard for the general reader to read and feels out of character compared to the light touch of the rest of the book. An opening chapter on the credit crunch of the Roman Empire and the challenges faced by Florentine merchants against the Catholic Church around the time of the Black Death feels fresher than the hackneyed accounts of the 2008 global financial crisis and the rise of Bitcoin. As the book progresses, the strains of maintaining a mono-causal explanation of how the modern world has evolved start to show.

That said, there is plenty to enjoy for economists and the general reader alike, and its strengths more than outweigh its shortcomings, especially as McWilliams clearly had a lot of fun writing it.

Money: A Story of Humanity is published by Simon & Schuster (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery costs may apply.