This paper examines what Kant says about the economy in Feyerabend’s notes of Kant’s lectures on natural right. While Feyerabend does not report Kant having a systematic discussion of the economy as a topic in its own right the text is interesting in what it shows about the context and the development of Kant’s thought on issues to do with political economy. I look at the Feyerabend lecture notes in relation to things said about the economy in Achenwall’s Natural Law, Kant’s text book, as well as in Kant’s Doctrine of Right. Looking at the three texts in relation to each other illuminates the development of Kant’s thinking and the paper focuses on tracing the relations between ideas to do with the economy in the three texts. I look at Kant’s developing thoughts on the economy in relation to the following ideas: an account of money; an account of value and price; the theorization of labor; taxation; property and the commons.

This chapter surveys Qiu’s ideas about financial administration, drawing on Section 4, “Administering State Finances” (Chapters 20–35) of the Supplement. The chapter discusses Qiu’s recommendations for regular and light taxation centred on the land tax and how to control government expenditure, before turning to his view of the state’s relationship with the market and merchants. The state must only involve itself in the market in a limited way, with the exception of moderating the supply of grain, since it is a basic necessity for life and the fundamental source of wealth. A brief overview of policies illustrates Qiu’s support for commerce. Throughout, the chapter also considers how Qiu’s ideas might have reflected or influenced actual practice. While there is some indication that his proposals may have been implemented, by the late Ming and especially from the later Wanli era onwards, the prudent financial administration that Qiu advocated did not exist.

This chapter discusses selected texts from contemporary Native American/First Nations, Black, Latinx, Asian American, Jewish American, and Arab American literature to show how they diversify hegemonic representations of financial capital and money as a medium. As they address issues such as settler colonialism, the afterlife of slavery, the concept of “alien capital,” deceptive promises of wealth, the social meanings of money, and the value of their groups’ respective cultural capital, they feature a range of stylistic innovations that illuminate the entanglements of literary and financial discourses in the past as well as the present.

In this chapter, I investigate the aura of criminality that lingers around capitalism in feminist discourses of the long 1970s. Navigating landmark works of feminist economics, I establish how polemical publications by Gayle Rubin, Silvia Federici, and Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa instrumentalize the logics and rhetorics of theft in order to evoke the exploitation of women in capitalism, and I examine how these logics and rhetorics are likewise deployed to structure specific figurations of stealing in literary works by Marilyn French, Alix Kates Shulman, Marge Piercy, Rita Mae Brown, and Audre Lorde. My focus here falls primarily on those protagonists who remain trapped within the strictures of the realist feminist novel. What strategies do these women develop for resisting or mitigating the institutionalized terms of their financial oppression? Through an analysis of the ways in which stealing operates within a wider matrix of crimes against the kindred systems of capitalism and patriarchy, I investigate how theft figures in feminist writing as a viable compensatory opportunity for women. Regardless of its criminality, to what extent does the feminist novel present the case that stealing – in its various guises – is sometimes the only pragmatic response to the immediate problem of women’s oppression?

The introduction initially approaches the topic of money and American literature via key passages from the work of Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Morrison. It then traces three key threads running through the following chapters. Firstly, it considers the close interrelationship between money and ideas of American nationhood: how the unity of the “United States” has been fostered, and unsettled, through monetary initiatives, schemes, and experiments. Next, it addresses the interplay between materiality and immateriality – “real” and “imaginary” forms of value – that has been a persistent topic of debate in American monetary history, as well as the closely related question of money’s deep affinity with writing as a different but connected form of value-bearing inscription. A pivotal, money-themed chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) serves as a case study. The introduction’s final section foregrounds the fundamental question of money’s relation to power and identity: its constitutive role in structures of inequality, exploitation, and marginalization and, in particular, its inextricability – as society’s dominant measure of value – from conceptions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Examples from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nella Larsen serve to illustrate these ideas.

The market culture of the antebellum period developed its own accounting techniques and genres to keep track of the flows of money, credit, and goods involved in exchange. This chapter shows how the money form was variously parodied, adopted, and resisted by Charles Frederick Briggs, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson, writers who were forced into a reckoning with the new market society, its moneymaking culture, and its commitment to the practices of accounting.

While the British or continental marriage plot generally culminates in a high-stakes social transaction involving fixed sums of old money, the story of American marriage in realist fiction is often less about inheritance than about the abstract, dynamic, and unpredictable force of new wealth. In both its new- and old-world settings, the marriage plot is fundamentally a money plot, but the kind of money at issue tends to differ in important respects, and the role of marriage in either reproducing or disrupting social conditions also differs as a result. Simply put, if the possibilities of heteronormative social reproduction signified by marriage were the things that chiefly struck the imaginations of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell, it seems that for William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and other writers of American realism, money itself was the romance of the realist moment in America. It follows that the American marriage plot often enters the period’s fiction less as the climactic mechanism of social reproduction than as a minor event in the story of money’s own reproductive capability.

How has American “money art” responded to new developments in financialized capitalism? Why do bills and coins continue to feature prominently in American art, given the turn toward cashless transactions? This chapter first contextualizes these questions, by considering prominent historical themes in American money art. Then, it focuses on how works from the past three decades by Dread Scott, Martha Rosler, and Pope.L explore the relationship between money and everyday performance. These works position coins and bills as objects that continue to organize people’s actions, behaviors, and beliefs, even though their roles in society are changing. Within financialized capitalism, people’s embodied habits of handling money reveal a tacit faith in currency as a trusted store of value – even as crisis-ridden financial systems upend commonsense faith in money. Scott, Rosler, and Pope.L, among other artists, inaugurate an approach to money art that I term “performing currency”: choreographing action around coins and bills as a way to contemplate how rapidly changing financial conditions clash with long-standing embodied habits of handling money.

While exploring how specialist medical publishers and regular practitioners worked together to publish and advertise medical works on sexual matters, Chapter 3, Publishing for Professional Advantage, shows that the boundaries between communicating knowledge, promoting expertise, and trading on medical eroticism were not just blurry in contexts of the pornography trade and irregular medical practice. They were also blurry in regular medicine. Works on reproduction and sexual health issued by medical publishers were often textually similar to those issued by pornographers and irregulars, worked up using similar techniques, advertised, and distributed to non-medical readers in similar ways, and, regular practitioners often argued, for similar purposes. The chapter explores how and why these overlaps aroused particular concern among groups that advocated radical reforms to the medical profession. Rather than seeking to discipline regular medical publishing, however, reformers initially took a different route: they launched campaigns aimed at stamping out irregular practitioners’ trade in sexual health manuals.

This chapter examines gender and sexuality in the writings of Sean O’Casey, through analysis of three works that demonstrate his preoccupation with the way women’s sexuality intersects with money, class, and sex work. As well as examining The Plough and the Stars (1926) and its reception, the chapter analyses two of his lesser-studied works – the short story ‘The Job’, and the prose poem ‘Gold and Silver Will Not Do’ from Windfalls (1934) – and the chapter highlights certain connections between the short-story writing and Eileen O’Casey’s personal experiences.

This chapter deals with the relationship between digital monies and basic societal values such as privacy and individual freedom. Threats to privacy and related concerns have risen in the digital age. Information technologies allow companies and governments to collect, store, maintain, and disseminate information on all dimensions of individual and collective life. Privacy is a basic human need defended by legislations and constitutions worldwide. Privacy helps explaining the attractiveness of cash. Some of today’s commercial applications of information technology imply intrusions into the personal sphere. Societal concerns about anonymity, because it facilitates unlawful and criminal activity, must also be taken into consideration, but there are reasons why some privacy of monetary transactions should be preserved, and cash is uniquely suited for that. Another question concerns freedom to choose the money. This idea was proposed originally by the so-called Austrian school of thought. Followers of the school of thought associated with Friedrich von Hayek argued that currencies should compete with one another. That school however underestimated important objections; first and foremost is the collective interest ingredient of a well-functioning money, which makes private competition ill-suited as means for promoting good monies. The chapter concludes explaining why some of these objections apply to crypto assets as well.

This chapter summarizes the content of the book, with some key questions in mind: Can money change radically as a result of digitalization? Can digital money make life better for the ordinary citizen? What are the risks involved? How should the boundaries between private sector and government be designed?

A new economic model begins to emerge. After the turn of the century, the worldview made of free markets, globalization, and liberal democracy met multiple crises. While the political pendulum swings back toward government control, economists and independent agencies should promote balance, mitigating the tendency toward the extremes of public opinions divided into opposite camps. The tendency toward a stronger presence of the government in the economy must be controlled; the perimeter of open and competitive markets should not be restricted to the point at which they lose their creative force. In this book we reflect on these developments through the prism of one of the most ancient and fundamental societal institutions: money. Money is a mirror of society; it reveals the drivers, contradictions, strengths, weaknesses, and failures of society at large. We build on two convictions. The first is the value of history, to tell us what money is, what purpose should it serve, and how best it should be designed and governed. The second is that the fundamental purpose and requirements of money do not change through time or space. What changes are the manifestations of money. Technology is part of this process and should be used to serve money’s purposes better.

This chapter outlines the history of a major pan-European financial infrastructure called TARGET2-Securities (T2S) implemented by the European Central Bank in 2015. Today, T2S is the main engine settling cross-border financial transactions in the Eurozone. The chapter describes the overall design and functioning of T2S and presents a history of its making. In particular, the chapter focuses on situating T2S: (1) in the wider landscape of European financial market integration; and (2) in the longue durée of international financial market infrastructure integration. It proposes what the author calls an “amplification thesis” to account for the relationship between European and ancient dimensions of the problems that motivated the creation of T2S. Specifically, it highlights how ancient paradoxes of credit and settlement transpose onto contemporary European financial market integration and how T2S can be seen as a new techno-political response to those problems.