Chapter 2 investigates the extent of the use of Bank notes in British society during the Bank Restriction period. Drawing upon the Bank of England’s Lost Note Books – the record of claims submitted by customers who had lost their Bank notes – this chapter traces the geographical and social distribution of Bank note users. Following in the footsteps of John Clapham, who explored what he called the ‘radius of the Bank of England note’, this chapter reveals the patterns of the Bank note’s diffusion into British society and the underlying causes of its penetration into a number of places on the British Isles. The three factors that significantly affected the pattern of diffusion were commerce, the culture of sociability and Britain’s ongoing wars with France. These economic and extra-economic factors determined where the Bank notes were likely to see relatively extensive use. This chapter’s argument is underpinned by a large data set compiled from the Lost Note Books, which contain information about Bank note users’ identity as well as their geographical and social distribution. This unique source provides valuable insights into the diffusion of Bank note use.

The Introduction provides the general context for what this book calls the communal currency tradition in British society. Its chronology starts in the early 1790s when the French revolutionary government’s experiment with the state-issued fiat paper currency, the assignat, caused heated discussion in Britain, which eventually consolidated Britain’s currency exceptionalism. The recent revival of the state theory of money (neo-chartalism) provides a reference point for the book’s unique theoretical outlook, which is explained by drawing upon the existing literature on economics, sociology and historical studies. After an overview of the development of monetary ideas, the communal currency tradition, which was closely associated with the idea of voluntary acceptance, is further explained based upon the writings of Edmund Burke and his involvement in the legal ban on the circulation of assignats in England. The broad outline of the book’s discussion is delineated by presenting the scope of communal currency as it impacted the economic, political, cultural and social aspects of British society.

The Conclusion summarises the main arguments presented in the book. It contextualises, once again, the book’s discussion of communal currency by contrasting it with the statist and metallist perspectives. The book ends by briefly describing how the memory of the Bank Restriction was forgotten and then rewritten by nineteenth-century authors such as Harriet Martineau and Thomas Carlyle as they saw the ‘cash nexus’ as the antithesis of communal relations.

Chapter 5 describes the dramatic changes of situation surrounding paper currency in post-war Britain. It focuses on the forgery crisis of 1818, which significantly undermined public trust in the Bank and its notes. Forgery became an acute problem after 1815, when the risk of becoming a victim (and unintended perpetrator) of the crime was not negligible. As the Bank claimed to be the sole arbiter of Bank notes’ authenticity, note users regarded the Bank’s ability to nullify economic transactions as a grave threat to the security of economic relations and private property. This chapter discusses the public backlash against the Bank as a radicalised version of communal currency. Britain’s note users rejected the idea that the Bank had the exclusive claim to authentic and unauthentic notes as Bank notes, according to the Bank’s critics, belonged to note users and their community. The forgery crisis gave ammunition to anti-paper radicals like Cobbett, while Britain’s note users were losing faith in the system of inconvertible paper, which now rested upon the state’s power to enforce currency circulation – under the Stanhope Act – and the Bank’s judicial violence.

Chapter 6 traces the last years of Britain’s communal currency. From the chapter’s examination of the resumption debate, it emerges that the decision on resumption stemmed from loss of faith in inconvertible currency and the fractured state of British society, rather than from unanimous support for the theory or policy of the gold standard. This chapter reveals that the supporters of resumption were a mixed group of people, including those with metallist and non-metallist views alike. The anti-resumption campaign lacked coherence, but ultimately it was the fractured state of British society that made inconvertible currency unsustainable: Britain’s note users no longer saw themselves as a single community of money users but as competing groups with different economic interests. The rest of the chapter illustrates the process by which the remnants of communal currency were gradually chipped away in the following twelve years, which were punctuated by major events such as the financial crisis of 1825 and the political run on the Bank of England in 1832. This chapter closes in 1833, when the fate of currency voluntarism was finally sealed as the Bank note became legal tender.

The conclusion of Money, Value, and the State reflects on the rise of a neoliberal government of value. The architecture of political economy for postcolonial Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—their currency management, agrarian credit, export monopolies, and price controls—was similar to how many other nation-states managed capitalism, exerted sovereignty, and cultivated citizenship in the postwar decades. And like many other parts of the world, by the late-1970s, the government of value in East Africa was challenged by new models of determining worth. The neoliberal proviso to “get prices right” targeted the legitimacy of the moneychanger state: instead of controlling the conversion between currencies and managing exchange rates, central banks would delegate power to commercial firms. It was likewise a call to eliminate state monopolies on the valuation of export crops and other commodities in favor of merchants’ power to set prices. Yet, instead of merely being a project of marketisation, neoliberalism was always a theory of state power and the ethos of citizenship. As structural adjustment was imposed—haltingly, imperfectly—by international creditors and their East African partners, the problematic of price continued to imply far more than the value of a commodity. It was a call to revalue the relationship among people and between citizens and states. As a result, the state government of value has not disappeared--it has been disavowed by central banks and bureaucracies that dismiss popular claims-making in favor of serving the sovereignty of capital.

If political independence provided Africans more latitude in how to pursue economic sovereignty, it hardly settled the matter of how it should be institutionalized. Debates about currency, for instance, persisted in East Africa after formal decolonization, and only in 1965-66 was the colonial money replaced by money issued by the independent states. This chapter traces the unexpected trajectory of decolonization, including the persistence of the imperial East African Currency Board. Decisions about the postcolonial monetary regimes were delayed, in part, by the machinations of British officials who tried to protect the racial capitalism of East Africa from the challenge of African independence. Yet, the establishment of national currencies and central banks was also delayed by Africans’ own commitment to supranational linkages, including an East African common market and currency. This chapter shows that the fortunes of a proposed East African Federation rose and fell on the dynamics of uneven and combined development in the region. And, finally, it examines how the central banking model adopted by postcolonial leaders reinforced the dependence of their nations on the accumulation of foreign currencies. The “moneychanger state,” in which postcolonial governments intermediated between domestic and foreign currencies, was critical to their own survival and ideas about development. Ultimately, though, it was the rural cultivators who would bear the burden of maintaining national solvency, a material reality that spurred a productivist ideology in which merit was revealed through earning export value.