The Social Life of Money in the English Past (review)

If the Roman goddess Juno Moneta were to pick up a copy of Deborah Valenze's monograph The Social Life of Money in the English Past, she would undoubtedly be surprised at the societal impact of those namesake silver coins minted in her temple over the past millennia. Professor Valenze has written a powerful argument that historians should reconsider the notion that the use of money in early modern England reveals an inexorable progress from an expression of social relationships to one of self-interested economic function. She argues convincingly that throughout the early modern period money was defined by its variable social contexts, not by the policies of central government or by abstract economic formulas.

Valenze focuses on the economy of England between ca. 1640 and 1770, the period when Locke, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith developed theories integral to the Enlightenment assumption that unregulated money is the precondition for individual freedom. She brings together contemporary sources on the use of money and recent research from across the social sciences on its function in the period to support her contention that these theories did not describe actual practice or prevailing ideas. This thesis not only improves our understanding of how and why economic decisions were made in the past, but also has a profound significance for understanding how we continue to make subjective economic decisions which have far-reaching social impact in the present.

The monograph is organized into three parts: the relationship between money and people, the changing meanings of money, and the ways in which money was used to regulate people's lives. The first part focuses on the historical views of money, including the recognition that coins were limited as the basis for economic exchange, and the ways in which notions of money were embedded in contemporary culture. The second part examines selected contemporary sources to reveal common attitudes toward money in different social circumstances and concludes with an account of the broadening current debate over the connection between money and individual liberty. The third section describes the use of money to achieve economic and social freedom for some, while compromising the opportunity for others through regulation, often akin to possession. This final part reveals the fundamental contradiction about the social impact of money, which manifested itself in late eighteenth-century debates about national debt and slavery.

While Valenze has effectively realized her argument, there are several issues raised by her choice of primary sources. First, the use of writings by two seventeenth-century clerics indicates that the fundamental connection between religious ideas about, and philosophical concepts of, money might profitably have been addressed directly at the outset. For example, the perceived separation between real money (coins) and imaginary money (credit), or between concrete institutional history and mutable mentalities, informed medieval debates between realism and idealism in religious thought. Just as Valenze argues that money cannot be separated from social relationships in early modern England, it seems equally true that ideas about money cannot be separated from religious values. The parish, whether rural or urban, served as the administrative agent for the commonweal. Both established and dissenting religious congregations supported this civic responsibility through active participation.

Second, while cities in England experienced dramatic growth and industrialized activity proliferated during the period covered by this study, much of the country remained rural and agricultural. For readers less well-versed in either economic theory or the history of the period, the thesis may appear either too abstract or ungrounded in broad experience. Perhaps comparative descriptions of the several different types of communities would have helped the reader place both the theories advanced and the sources cited into specific social contexts to demonstrate the impact on money of both ongoing social relationships and changes in its liquidity.

This monograph rewards the reader with an innovative approach to the history of complex interactions between social and...