Was economic life in the early Enlightenment years simply the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century iteration of an already well-established market economy, intensified by more emphasis on money's liberating possibilities and less on traditional restraints to self-centeredness? Or was it a much more unique and morally complicated historical moment than that? Deborah Valenze confronts these questions head-on in her ambitious new book that explores money's place, meanings, and transformative possibilities in the years of England's transition toward frank capitalism. The volume is a collection of eight related essays, each probing what Valenze judges to be an important, money-related matter in the years 1640–1770. These include, among others, the sources, scarceness, and varieties of coinage; imaginings and yearnings triggered by money; metaphors applied to money and its temptations; money-informed distinctions of power and powerlessness; and money's role in responses to poverty and vagrancy. The essays are gathered under three headings (“The Relationship between Money and Persons,” “Multiple Meanings of Money, ca. 1640–1730,” and “Regulating People through Money”), and the author offers her historiographical assumptions in a comprehensive introduction.

We do need to explain more fully how perceptions of self and world changed for those living through Karl Polyani's great transformation from subsistence to gain (The Great Transformation [1944; Boston, 1957], 41) and C. B. Macpherson's age of possessive individualism and predilection for exchange (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke [Oxford, 1962], 37, 54–55). Valenze assumes that most historians are too inured to progressive, functionalist explanations and their own experience of money's uses in free-market settings to be curious about the evanescent and unsettling impact of money on the imaginings, behaviors, and statuses of early modern people. Finding inspiration and guidance in recent work on money, credit, and related issues, much of it with an anthropological cast, by Margot Finn, William Reddy, Craig Muldrew, Geoffrey Ingham, and Malcolm Gaskill, Valenze informs the reader that in her study she will eschew “whiggish teleology,” confront the “universalizing tendencies” in typical histories of economic thought, and “ground enlightenment debates about the nature of capitalism in contemporary social conditions” (16). This will enable her to “de-center” money's legitimacy in these years and explore the social meanings in the “epistemological,” “social,” and, even, psychological “flux” it triggered (21, 23).

The book rewards with the broad sweep of Valenze's erudition about money, its history, its forms, and its protean inroads into the lives and minds of early modern people. Only in the early nineteenth century did the government begin to take full control of the minting and distribution of standardized coins. Before that, circulating currency was just as likely to have been privately produced—there were 3,543 tokeners in 1660s London alone—and, depending on the locale and circumstances, could have taken many forms, from coins to promissory and bank notes, from leather to tobacco, from nails to musket balls. Coins carried a variety of images and aphorisms on their “heads”; but the all-important “tales,” the value of the coin or substitute, most often was established in the give and take of its use. Thus, early modern people had to be resourceful in their acceptance of what was proffered. And there is ample evidence of tensions between those who favored the people's money, heterogeneous and locally accepted currencies, and advocates, like John Locke and John Evelyn, for a standardized, intrinsically valuable coinage. The much-heralded Recoinage of 1696 actually reduced the money in circulation by £1 million and impacted harshly on the working poor. In the developing discourse of political economy, Locke, Thomas Hobbes, William Petty, and Daniel Defoe often appropriated medical and physiological insights to suggest the circulatory and nourishing functions that money provided to the commonwealth. Of particular note in the proverbs about money in these years is that often they attributed animal and human forms, male and female, to money; others gave it intention and agency. Thus money could seduce the uninitiated, make men or deals or marriages, and run from its possessor. And popular writers John Taylor, William Winstanley, and Joseph Addison offered voices and picaresque adventures of coins on the move, each illustrating a different “trope” (75). Still, the uneasy consciences that money as a “metonym for avarice” (92) could cause is revealed in the inspired literature of Edmund Spenser and John Milton, the quotidian diaries of artisan Jeremiah Wallington and clergyman Ralph Josselin, and the workhouse plans of the Quaker reformer John Bellers.

That Valenze puts money at the center of her inquiries is both the boldness and fresh departure of her endeavor and the source of some liability as well. Early in the volume, citing Carl Wennerlind, Alan Dyer, and Karl Marx, Valenze maintains that money's exchange possibility operates as a “semiotic system” that “determines how we understand the world.” And one's acceptance of, or involvement in, this “symbolic system” leads to the “commodification of people and nature” (58–59). In the third cluster of essays, the most charged and controversial portion of the book, the author plays out her fascination with semiotic theory. She maintains that money dynamics and rhetoric in the early modern years consistently commodified individuals and created racial, gendered, and class hierarchies. Her larger goal seems to be to show that this blunted the freedom that modernity promised to the powerless, as did the government offering cash incentives to find and resettle migrants and vagrants and allowing indentured servitude and slavery in the oversees colonies. Valenze does not acknowledge that the long and troubled history of the localities’ and the national government's responses to structural poverty included attempts to limit not only the residency but the wages and consumer outlays of the poor. Nor does she plumb substantively the ongoing debate in the eighteenth century between proponents of the Poor Law's abolition (including settlement) and those who would sustain and reinforce it. More curious still is that several specters remain offstage and never discussed even at a paragraph's length in the book—the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century notions of liberty, free market, and modernity—even though their presence is evoked often in Valenze's argument. Thus the volume's concluding essay, which promises to explain how money was detoxified in the later enlightenment, remains elusive.

Money and commodity judgments of all types were challenging and unsettling customary thinking and behavior from the 1640s through the 1770s, and we must understand more about why and to what consequences for the modernization process. If some may find Valenze's exclusive focus on money, ingenious and resourceful as it is, too narrow and her conclusions too theory-performative to meet convincingly the challenge she has set for herself, all readers will be grateful for this intrepid and pathbreaking volume.