Introduction

It is remarkable how deferential people can be, even progressive people, when it comes to the subject of money. In a recent critical work debunking mainstream economics, for instance, the author instructs us that “monetary and financial systems are among human society’s greatest cultural and economic achievements.” Turning to the Bank of England, the same author confidently proclaims it to have been “a great civilizational advance.”1 I beg to differ. Rather than a benign medium for promoting the exchange of goods, money has been a technology of power. This is not to deny that it has facilitated trade (though it is to deny the absurd myth that money emerged out of barter).² It is merely to insist that money and finance are enmeshed within matrices of social power and tend to reproduce them.³

Critical theory insists that objects are not separable from their histories. Every object is defined by the process of its emergence and development. Rather than mere externalities, these processes are intrinsic to objects themselves.⁴ Where money is concerned, I submit that every layer of its sedimentation is mingled with the blood of slaves, of soldiers, of the colonized, of the exploited and oppressed. Notwithstanding the considerable differences between monetary regimes throughout history, these features have been at the core of each. And they are histories that must be ruptured if violence and domination are to be overcome.

In what follows, I contend that financial history is soaked in blood—blood that has flowed in the tracks of slavery, war, and empire. Thus, the arguments that follow are decidedly unconventional. Even among historians contributing to the major (and important) resurgence in the study of capitalism in the United States, the predominant picture on offer is too often that of “a capitalism born without blood,” as one commentator put it.5 This bloodless image of capitalism owes something to the way the global economic crisis of 2009 focused attention on esoteric financial instruments, such as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. So abstracted are these instruments from the everyday production of goods and services that it is all too easy for analysts to plunge into descriptions of mortgage-based derivatives and computerized trading as if there were no larger system in which people toil in sweatshops, warehouses, stores, and fields—and as if financial profits did not ultimately derive from these labors.⁶ To lose sight of such spaces, however, and of the bodies that toil there, is to succumb to a profound fetishism. It is to fail the critical test of tracking abstract financial technologies to the human labors that underpin them. In this respect, the chapters that follow might be considered an exercise in de-fetishizing criticism—one that connects the study of monetary and financial history to a phenomenology of the laboring body.

The theoretical work of tethering money to the body and its labors draws from insights that originate with Marx. In his 1844 “Notes on James Mill,” for instance, the young Marx turned his sights to the role of credit in the modern monetary system. “The substance, the body clothing the spirit of money is not money, paper, but instead it is my personal existence, my flesh and blood,” he wrote. “Credit no longer actualizes money-values in actual money but in human flesh and human hearts.”⁷ In this profound observation, Marx urged that the monetary values changing hands in the credit system are rooted—actualized, as he put it—in human flesh, in the body and its pains. Monetary power is thus vampiric, a ghostly presence haunting human flesh and blood.⁸ Because of this, credit and money also colonize our hearts—by means of perverse love of lucre, and by means of our mortal fear of the servitude that can accompany debt.

To start from the body is thus an essential protocol. However, human bodies are always enmeshed in history. Human life is the domain of historical bodies that carry traces of collective legacies of labor, desire, technology, domination, suffering, and resistance.⁹ An assessment of the record of money must therefore situate bodies in networks of power and oppression—among them class, patriarchy, and slavery. More than this, since class societies are always at war (or preparing for war), our protocol requires us to locate the immersion of historical bodies in relations of organized violence. In what follows, I extend this insight to monetary history from the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East to contemporary globalized capitalism. Exploring a range of monetary technologies that have taken shape in societies organized around war, slavery, and colonial plunder, I show that these are intrinsic elements of the history of money, not background stage effects.

When it comes to modern capitalist society, I consider Marx’s analysis of money—as an expression of the logic of generalized commodity exchange—to be indispensable.10 But money existed prior to capitalism and obeyed social logics distinct from it, even if these were grounded in domination. Indeed, Marx was well aware that the investigation he conducted in Capital, volume 1, operates at a preliminary level of theoretical abstraction. Concerned to delineate money’s basic logic in capitalist society, Marx initially bracketed consideration of credit markets, the banking system, the nation-state, public debt, and international finance. But all of the latter—and their entanglements with war and war finance—are essential to any actual history of money.¹¹ To trace this history requires an analysis of the commodity logic of money that incorporates the operations of the state. Marx recognized as much. He understood that states determine the unit of measure (e.g., dollars, yen, euros, yuan) within their sovereign territory. “Coining, like the establishment of a standard of prices, is the business of the State,” he remarked. And he further observed that the “different national uniforms worn at home by gold and silver as coins,” or by paper currencies, are all governed by the nation-state.¹² It is these different modalities of money— coin, paper currencies tied to precious metal, inconvertible paper money—that shape the history of monetary regimes.

To be sure, money’s most developed operations occur in an international space that exceeds the sovereignty of national states, which is why world money occupies the highest level in Marx’s theory. Yet, the global level is not an empty space. It is constituted in and through world competition among capitals and international rivalry between dominant nation-states. Integral to a theory of world money, therefore, is the analysis of international conflict and war—which is perhaps why Marx’s plan for his critique of capitalism was meant to culminate in books on the state, foreign trade, and the world market.13 This is fitting, since national currencies that have attained status as world money have done so on the basis of colonialism, empire, and war. As soon as we approach monetary regimes and institutions in these terms, we can readily appreciate the problems with describing, say, the formation of the Bank of England as “a great civilizational advance.” It was instead, as we will see, an advance in the technology of war finance. For its first century, the bank arranged payment for the ships, guns, and soldiers with which the British Empire fought France. And there is nothing particularly unique about the Bank of England in this regard: as one economist observed, all the “central banks in existence before 1850 were chartered in the context of war.”¹⁴

But war finance did not originate with modern society any more than money did. For this reason, this volume begins long before the rise of capitalism: with the emergence of full-fledged money in the ancient West Asia, and its crystallization in Greece. In so doing, it foregrounds the crucial role of the slave trade in the development of markets in the Mediterranean region. By beginning here, I also highlight payment for mercenary soldiers as an integral element in the origin of state-produced ancient coinage, which comprised the first modular form of money. I further show that ancient elites considered the hiring of mercenaries, and of wage laborers generally, as a variation on the purchase of slaves. All of this reinforces Marx’s account of the “primitive accumulation of capital” as a multifaceted process of bloody dispossession. Money appears in Marx’s story as a decisive instrument by which capital emerges into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”¹⁵

But money does not play the same role in all systems of social life and production. For this reason, these chapters make no claim to offer a general theory of money across the ages. Theory must be specific to its historical objects of study. Instead, these chapters proffer a unique historical account of money: one that demonstrates that in all class societies money is enmeshed in practices of domination and expropriation.¹⁶ I further suggest that three modular forms of general-purpose money can be identified in the broad sweep of socioeconomic history, all of them issued by states: metallic coinage, paper banknotes legally backed by precious metal, and paper fiat money untethered to any commodity. The classic instances of each emerged, respectively, in the silver coins of ancient Athens, the notes issued by the Bank of England (founded in 1694), and the US dollar following its detachment from gold in 1971. Each of these modular forms characterizes a historical epoch.17 Equally significant, I show that each developed as a solution to specific challenges associated with war finance. That war was endemic in ancient Greek society is obvious from even a passing acquaintance with Homer’s epics. That it was also deeply imbricated in the emergence of money is a central argument of the first two chapters, which also point to imperial Rome as the heir to Greece’s monetary innovations.

Long after the demise of the Roman Empire, coinage continued to operate as the modular form of money in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Notwithstanding a decline in the degree of monetization in Europe after Rome’s collapse, metallic coinage remained the prevailing means of payment and exchange. As Eurasian commercial life accelerated in the later medieval period, so did military conflict.¹⁸ By 1270 CE, silver coins and bullion comprised a form of world money that lubricated trade from Western Europe to China.¹⁹ And just as war became increasingly commercialized in this period, so commerce became increasingly militarized. One scholar observes that for six centuries in Europe, from the Middle Ages into the early modern period, “people bought and sold military manpower like a commodity on the global market.”²⁰ This refers, of course, to the purchase of mercenary soldiers. So historically significant were mercenaries that, in the thirteenth century CE, Egypt came under the rule of descendants of enslaved mercenary soldiers, known as the Mamluks.

As we move into the era of the rise of capitalism in Europe, war and the hiring of mercenaries moved into higher gears. With states seeking new means of conducting and funding military conflict, the Bank of England perfected its machinery of war finance. In so doing, it established the second modular form of money. But it could do so only on the basis of new social relations of production and a new form of political power, one that internalized market imperatives within the very heart of the modern state. The power of capital, and its necessary manifestation in war, became constitutive of the bourgeois order.²¹ Just as modern banking was a regime of war finance from its inception, so was capitalism a system of war capitalism—and it remains so today.²² This is the story at the heart of chapters 3 and 4.

By the twentieth century’s Thirty Years’ War (1914–45), the United States had attained dominance within global capitalism. Essential to its rise was a long internal struggle to adopt the second modular form of money, paper notes tied to gold and secured by a central bank. But, as much as it ascended to imperial hegemony through this form of money, the United States was also to destroy it. At the height of the Vietnam War, in 1971, the monetary arrangements integral to war capitalism underwent a seismic shock when the US government disconnected its currency from gold, thereby reconstituting the dollar as an imperial fiat money. Since then, state fiat monies have become the general form of late capitalist money—its third modular form—and have brought with them new modalities of financial turbulence and turmoil of the sort witnessed in the 2009 global financial crisis. I explore this epochal departure, and its lasting reverberations, in chapter 5.

In writing a counter-history of money organized around ancient Greece and Rome, Britain, and the United States, there is a risk that the reader will imagine these to be the world’s great innovators. Yet, even in the domain of empire, these states were often mere imitators. One can make the case that the empires of Persia, Babylon, and early Islam, and those of the Mongols, Ottomans, Mughals, and Khazars, exceeded what the Greeks achieved in many domains. The Mongols under Genghis Khan (Temüjin) and his successors, for instance, established “the largest land empire in history.”²³ And China undertook the world’s first sustained experiment with paper money, albeit one that collapsed and thus failed to establish a new modal form (outlined in chapter 2). My focus is on Greece, Britain, and the United States only because their exercises in destruction and domination, war and empire, were underpinned by monetary innovations that became generalized. This is also why they figure prominently in the global history of colonialism, which is a central part of the story told here. All of this further serves to remind us why anti-colonialism is essential to the prospect of a world beyond empire and war.

The chapters that follow also deploy an interdisciplinary approach to the study of money and its history. Epic poets—like Homer and Hesiod—enter our analysis, as do novelists such as Daniel Defoe and Herman Melville. This has to do with the capacity of literature to break through the obfuscation that so frequently surrounds economic questions, particularly monetary ones. As the gadfly economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed, “The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is the one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.”²⁴ And these evasions at the heart of mainstream economics serve to protect power and privilege. To the degree to which they pierce such mystifications, poets and philosophers often have more to teach us about the study of money than economists do.

This volume is thus intended as a work of demystification. It is also “an experiment in history, solidarity, and hope,” to borrow a formulation from radical scholar Vincent Harding.25 The history it traces is one of money, slavery, empire, and war. The solidarity it embraces is with the oppressed across the ages. And the hope it nurtures is in a future free of violence and oppression. I will have succeeded if this work makes some small contribution to that cause.