Money: A Story of Humanity

MONEY.
The object of our desires.
The engine of our genius.
Humanity’s greatest invention.

Money is everything. It brings freedom and it takes it away. It inspires and corrupts us. But what is money? Is it the main thing holding us back from utopia or is it the one constant that’s driven us to success?

In his illuminating, entertaining and often surprising book, economist David McWilliams charts the relationship between humans and money – from clay tablets in Mesopotamia to coins in Ancient Greece, from mathematics in the medieval Arab world to the French Revolution, and from the emergence of the US dollar right up to today’s cryptocurrency. Along the way, we meet a host of characters who have innovated with money, disrupting society and transforming the way we live. Like humanity, money is ever changing, adapting to its time and circumstances. The question is, over the last 5000 years, have we changed money or has money changed us?

Money tells an astonishing new story of our species. Taking the reader on an epic journey through the history of money, McWilliams reveals its fundamental role in our society.

Review

'Entertaining and compelling . . . raises profound questions as to how we have ordered our societies and the inequalities that we have built into the template of our civilisations . . . . a fabulous read'

Irish Times

'Equally entertaining and insightful'

Yanis Varoufakis

'If, as David McWilliams complains, economists take the fun out of money, then he is the exception that proves the rule: a man who could not write a boring sentence if he tried, and who, in this brilliantly informative and entertaining book, has done his subject splendid justice'
Tom Holland

'Pacey chapters make for a series of entertaining – and at times irreverent – tales which relay a story of money that we all should know!'

Linda Yueh, author of The Great Crashes: Lessons from Global Meltdowns and How to Prevent Them

‘David McWilliams is the best explainer of economics I know. Here he explains the world through money, and it’s fantastically entertaining. He's the kind of writer who makes you feel clever, because he helps you grasp things you never understood before’

Simon Kuper, author of 'Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories took over the UK'

About the Author

David McWilliams is a global economist, writer and broadcaster whose unique ability to communicate complex societal and economic structures is unparalleled. Having worked at the Central Bank of Ireland, he became a faculty member at Trinity College, Dublin business school. He's been described as being to economics what David Attenborough is to the natural sciences and Brian Cox is to physics.