What lessons does monetary history offer that are relevant to today's economic, political and social problems?
Because of the difficulties of conducting experiments in the ordinary business of economic life, at the centre of which is money, it is most fortunate that history generously provides us with a proxy laboratory, a guidebook of more or less relevant alternatives. Around the next corner there may be lying in wait apparently quite novel monetary problems which in all probability bear a basic similarity to those that have already been tackled with varying degrees of success or failure in other times and places.Yet despite the antiquity and ubiquity of money its proper management and control have eluded the rulers of most modern states partly because they have ignored the wide-ranging lessons of the past or have taken too blinkered and narrow a view of money. Economists, and especially monetarists, tend to overestimate the purely economic, narrow and technical functions of money and have placed insufficient emphasis on its wider social, institutional and psychological aspects.
There are therefore many advantages which can only be obtained by tracing monetary and financial history with a broad brush over the whole period of its long and convoluted development, where primitive and modern moneys have overlapped for centuries and where the logical and chronological progressions have rarely followed strictly parallel paths.
Glyn Davies, A History of Money, Preface page xvii.
A History of Money from Ancient
Times to the Present Day by Glyn Davies. rev. ed. Cardiff: University of
Wales Press, 1996. 716p.
ISBN 0 7083 1351 5.
The book is available from various sources in addition to the usual bookshop channels.
There is also a collection of essays based on themes from the book.
The complete annotated chronology is divided up into smaller files by period. Select the timeline for the period in which you are interested. In cases where events took place over a number of years they my overlap the period boundaries below. In such cases the events will be listed in more than one timeline. The page numbers given after the annotations refer to the places in the book where the topics are mentioned.
For more information about the context in which these topics are discussed see the very detailed table of contents of the book.
Page numbers in the range 657-672 refer to the postscript in the revised (paperback) edition. Page numbers lower than 657 are the same in both editions.
