This chapter explores anti-utopian satire in bestselling British author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Like the anti-chivalric satire of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, the Discworld books celebrate pragmatism and local knowledge rather than political ideals. The Discworld is alive with vivid utopian impulses, however, the chapter argues that they frequently lack concrete detail. Pratchett is more concerned with constructing a colourful world of humour, heroism, and villainy. The Ankh-Morpork books reflect on the processes of historical change, accelerating a medieval city-state into liberal industrial modernity via an array of fantastically estranged forms. The city itself, however, fails to actualise into a utopian vision of the future. Rather, Pratchett’s fantasy series articulates a deep suspicion of the kind of political radicalism often associated with utopian thinking. Through a close reading of two books in the series, Night Watch (2002) and Making Money (2007), the chapter considers how Pratchett’s fantasy world laments structural violence whilst lampooning utopian remedies to such violence, such as democratic elections, trade unions, industrial action, or new kinds of post-capitalist value.

Chapter 6 looks at how money acts both as an element in the moral concretion of the revolution’s moral project – one that here takes the form also of a ‘moral economy’ – but also a prime catalyst for its deterioration in the face of the pervasive condition of moral-cum-material decline Cubans call necesidad, intimating a sense of destitution that is felt to exert itself as an uncontrollable force. The relation between the revolution and what lies beyond it, then, is seen here through the prism of the duality of money as both a qualitative token of value and quantitative scale for commensuration. The former is central to the way pesos (Cuba’s national currency, issued by the revolutionary state) operate as moral concretions of the revolution, marking out the scope of its moral economy. The latter, however, comes into its own with the use of US dollars and locally issued currencies pegged to it, which have become increasingly pervasive in everyday consumption since the 1990s. In its capacity to commensurate all values quantitatively, the dollar rubs out the distinction between the state’s moral economy and the variously licit and informal realms of transaction that have grown alongside it in Cuba. Crucially, in this way, it tends to trump the revolution’s effort to position itself as transcendental condition of possibility for life, encompassing it with its own transcendental scope.

This chapter addresses the issue of the “starving artist.” Often, creative lives are not the most remunerative and this chapter outlines how people pay their expenses while devoting themselves to their art. Some have the advantage of a spouse who is the main breadwinner, others hold a “day job” in addition to their creative work, and others have less traditional sources of income. One artist also discusses how it works when both spouses are creative workers.

This chapter outlines the history of previous institutions that created forms of capital in Europe, including land, dowries, banks, bills of exchange, and government debt. It examines the reasons why the system of informal oral credit, as it had developed over the previous 100-odd years, began to be criticised during the Commonwealth period. Many authors started to claim that it was both inefficient and an obstacle to economic growth. Many pamphlets were published containing proposals of different sorts of banks, which would issue paper currency to speed up circulation. Some of these were based on previous European examples. The nature of these proposals is examined, together with a summary of how they related to the creation of the Bank of England. Its establishment is normally seen as the successful outcome of this debate, but in fact it was not primarily created as an institution to expand the supply of credit, but to help fund the government debt. The increasing cost of the War of Spanish Succession did, however, result in the issue of things like Exchequer or Treasury bills, as well as South Sea and Bank stock to fund the war. The last part of the chapter focuses on the significant effect these multiple forms of paper currency had on liquidity within London.

This chapter traces the development of money, credit and banking systems in Europe, from their origins to their modern forms. It examines how the reintroduction of monetary systems following the collapse of the Roman Empire contributed to economic growth. The chapter also discusses the evolution of credit markets, the rise of banks and the development of paper money, with an emphasis on the role these institutions played in supporting economic development. It explores the relationship between financial innovation and economic crises, illustrating how the financial system has both facilitated growth and contributed to periods of instability. The chapter concludes by assessing the impact of financial systems on long-term economic development in Europe.

This chapter examines the long-held belief that Arnold Schoenberg endured dire financial hardship for most of his life, due in large part to his unwavering and highly principled commitment to modern music. Schoenberg can be compared to Mozart with regard to his money woes: both composers apparently struggled to support themselves and their families and were tragically under-appreciated and under-compensated during their lifetimes, despite the enormity of their artistic significance. In each case, however, the situation is more nuanced: for both composers, money came and went, for a variety of reasons. In the chapter, the popular mythos of Schoenberg’s ‘perpetual insolvency’ is contextualized and challenged by considering his constantly changing personal and professional circumstances, and the different ways in which he earned money.

Fifth-century Greek tragedy and visual art centres on interaction between people, including antithetical relations, reflecting a society shaped by monetised exchange and commerce. Platonic metaphysics is focused on unchanging being, placing supreme value on the possession of money and devaluing or excluding exchange and interaction. Although dialogues such as the Phaedo contain the idea of the unity of opposites, and binary opposites such as body and soul, Platonic metaphysics aims at the negation of opposites, and thus of antithesis. The contrast between being and seeming emerges in fifth-century tragedy and philosophy, but it is given much greater prominence by Plato and is linked with the theory of Forms. One of the Platonic accounts of the relationship between Forms and particulars is in terms of original (Form) and copy or image (particulars). Plato is the first to offer a theorization of the idea of the image (in the Sophist) and to define the idea of mere image (not reality). Plato’s treatment of the being-seeming relation, like the theory of Forms generally, expresses the reification of the value of money, treated as the basis of possession, excluding exchange.

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.