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This book offers an interpretation of the Chinese monetary system, charting its evolution by examining key moments in history – from BCE 600 up to the present. It places these moments in international perspective by comparing primary sources in multiple languages and across three millennia. The book begins exploring the trajectory of Chinese currency at the birth of coinage around the world and ends with the implications of the current global financial crisis for China and the rest of the world. Its narrative highlights the way that Chinese money developed in relation to the currencies of other countries, paying special attention to the origins of paper money, the relationship between the West’s ascendancy and its mineral riches, the linkages between pre-modern finance, debasement, and then inflation with the emergence of nation-statehood. The book then looks ahead to the possible globalization of the RMB, the currency of the People’s Republic of China against the backdrop of growing global uncertainties as to America’s federal debt.

This book challenges the static, ahistorical models on which economics continues to rely. These models presume that markets operate on a “frictionless” plane where abstract forces play out independent of their institutional and spatial contexts, and of the influences of the past. In reality, at any point in time exogenous factors are themselves outcomes of complex historical processes, and are shaped by institutional and spatial contexts, which are “carriers of history,” including past economic dynamics and market outcomes. To examine the connections between gradual, evolutionary change and more dramatic, revolutionary shifts, the text takes on a wide array of historically salient economic questions—ranging from how formative, European encounters reconfigured the political economies of indigenous populations in Africa, the Americas, and Australia to how the rise and fall of the New Deal order reconfigured labor market institutions and outcomes in the twentieth-century United States. These explorations are joined by a common focus on formative institutions, spatial structures, and market processes. Through historically informed economic analyses, contributors recognize the myriad interdependencies among these three frames, as well as their distinct logics and temporal rhythms.

The worldwide spread of neoliberalism has transformed economies, polities, and societies everywhere. In conventional accounts, American and Western European economists, such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, sold neoliberalism by popularizing their free market ideas and radical criticisms of the state. Rather than focusing on the agency of a few prominent, conservative economists, this book reveals a dialogue among many economists on both sides of the Iron Curtain about democracy, socialism, and markets. These discussions led to the transformations of 1989 and, unintentionally, the rise of neoliberalism. The book takes a truly transnational look at economists' professional ideas over 100 years across the capitalist West and the socialist East. Clearly translating complicated economic ideas and neoliberal theories, it presents a significant reinterpretation of Cold War history, the fall of communism, and the rise of today's dominant economic ideology.

Does humanity progress primarily through leaders organizing and directing followers, or through trial and error by individuals free to chart their own path? For most of human history ruling classes had the capacity and the desire to tightly regiment society, to the general detriment of progress. But beginning in the 1500s, Europeans developed a series of arguments for simply leaving well enough alone. First in the form of the scientific method, then in the form of free expression, and finally in the form of the continuously, spontaneously reordered free market, people began to accept that progress is hard, and requires that an immense number of mistakes be tolerated so that we may learn from them. This book tells the story of the development of these three ideas, and for the first time tells of the mutual influence among them. It outlines the rise, and dramatic triumph, of each of these self-regulating systems, followed by a surprising rise in skepticism, especially in the economic context. Such skepticism in the 20th century was frequently costly and sometimes catastrophic. Under the right conditions, which are more frequent than generally believed, self-regulating systems in which participants organize themselves are superior. We should accept their turbulence in exchange for the immense progress they generate.