The History of Money: From Bartering to Banking by Martin Jenkins (review)

This is not your standard children’s review of the historical shift from barter to currency, with emphasis on exotic media for trade, culminating in our own paper and coinage. Instead, this is a post-2008 financial meltdown essay, broken into short, lively chapters tinged with tart humor, that walks kids through development of money and money-lending. Cautious in his speculation about trade before the age of written records, Jenkins keeps his focus on just who stood to profit at each stage of finance’s evolution and thereby shines a floodlight on how the transformation from money as a tangible object to money as a faith-based transaction brought us to our present system. A spacious layout and Kitamura’s delightful cartoon vignettes make the dense topics of taxation, interest, and inflation, and international currency valuation less daunting. Kids growing up in a world of plastic, QR codes, and ATMs will undoubtedly find Jenkins’ work more relevant than many titles lingering around the 332s for a decade. With pockets ever less apt to jingle, it’s high time for this reappraisal of the “strange slippery stuff, hard to pin down, always appearing and disappearing and existing only when people agree it exists.”