Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; Abbreviations; Introduction: the social life of money, c.1640–1770; Part I. The Relationship Between Money and Persons: 1. Coins of the realm: the development of a demotic sense of money; 2. The phantasm of money: the animation of exchange media in England, c.1600–1770; Part II. Mutable Meanings of Money, ca.1640–1730: 3. Circulating mammon: attributes of money in early modern English culture; 4. Refuge from money's mischief: John Bellers and the Clerkenwell Workhouse; 5. Quarrels over money: The determination of an acquisitive self in the early eighteenth century; Part III. Regulating People Through Money: 6. The measure of money: equivalents of personal value in English law; 7. The price of people: rethinking money and power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; 8. Money makes masteries: the triumph of the monetary self in the long eighteenth century.

Promotional Information

A study of how people understood and used money from 1630 to 1800 in England.

About the Author

Deborah Valenze is Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University, in New York City. She is the author of The First Industrial Woman, Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England, and numerous scholarly articles.

Reviews

'Deborah Valenze's extraordinarily original The Social Life of Money in the English Past removes the history of money from the economists and inserts it into the lives of people who cannot quite understand it but find they have to live by it. The issues it raises go well beyond eighteenth-century Britain.' The Guardian 'Using personal letters, diary entries, pamphlets, allegorical tales, poems, plays, and visual art, the Social Life of Money is seen from a variety of perspectives. Anthropological, literary, feminist, and social theories are firmly integrated into a dense analysis of social change in early modern England.' Literature and History