The History of Money

“Learned, lively and often irreverent, David McWilliams’s The History of Money is rich with surprising details about currency, then and now.”
–The New York Times

“Now here is a book. It instructs and provokes and entertains…Iconoclasm is the author’s default sensibility and not only with respect to the economics profession… McWilliams’s worldview is not so easily slotted into the categories of left or right… Progress is McWilliams’s North Star.”
–James Grant, The Wall Street Journal

“The History of Money is the rare economics book that reads like a thriller.”
–New York Post

“Money has found its greatest biographer. The subject of this book has spent most of its life on the run from being well understood. At least until now. In this swashbuckling epic of grand sweeps and tight close ups, David McWilliams brilliantly excavates the history of money, which is our history too. Evolution and revolution. He is a master storyteller of rare talent.”
–Bono

”‘Most economists do not really understand money… They take the fun out of it.’ Thus begins Irish economist David McWilliams’s rollicking ride through the pecuniary past. From the 20,000-year-old Ishango Bone (the first known accounting instrument) to today’s M-Pesa (Kenya’s mobile phone payments system), the reader is whisked at the speed of a Weimar printing press through the history of financial evolution. If Flann O’Brien and Milton Friedman had ever collaborated, this might have been the result. I was entertained. But I also learned.”
–Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money

“It’s a crime, it can’t buy me love, it’s the root of all evil, it makes the world go around, it’s what I want. Money has long been the subject of song and sayings. And now, at last, we have The History of Money: a clear and endlessly fascinating explanation of what this is all about and how it all works.”
–Steven Pinker, Harvard University, author of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…

“A cracking book that is as enjoyable as it is readable.”
–Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

“If, as David McWilliams complains, economists take the fun out of money, then he is the exception that proves the rule: a man who could not write a boring sentence if he tried, and who, in this brilliantly informative and entertaining book, has done his subject splendid justice.”
–Tom Holland, author of Dominion

David McWilliams is a former central bank economist based in Dublin. He hosts The David McWilliams Podcast and is the founder of Kilkenomics, the economics and stand-up comedy festival. McWilliams also writes a weekly column for The Irish Times and is adjunct professor of global economics at Trinity College Dublin.

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