Money is an important subject, not only in the field of financial history, but in a wider range of social sciences. Big names cited by Catherine Vuillermot in the introduction to this volume demonstrate the breadth of consideration of the issue: Aristotle is followed by Jean Bodin and Irving Fisher on the functions of money, David Ricardo and Thomas Tooke on the monetary debates of the nineteenth century, John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman on banks and credit, and of course historians like Fernand Braudel and Marc Bloch. Money matters, therefore, but how? This book – the proceedings of a symposium organised by the Association Française des Historiens Economistes and supervised by Albert Broder and Marc Flandreau – gives us various touchstones. The central viewpoint of the book is that ‘money is a “historical character” that deserves a volume of reflection’ (p. 17) [translation by the reviewer]. The sixteen papers in the volume, all of them of fine quality, are assembled into three sections in chronological order: the following comments refer to these sections.

After Catherine Grandjean demonstrates the gradual shift from Greek money to Roman money, Yves Coativy shows how money functioned as a symbol of the power of kings and princes, along with impressive illustrations from France during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Then Phillipe Lardin analyses bookkeeping and real money in circulation in the city of Rouen during the fifteenth century and proposes ‘to try to put together the abstract data of accounts with the real facts of monetary circulation’ (p. 67). Finally, Marc Bompaire inquires into the roles played by the exchange dealers and public authorities in giving premiums or discounting money, with a precise case study of fifteenth-century Montpellier. One of the most important issues in this section regarding antiquity and the medieval period is the extent of information asymmetry. As defined in the introduction, money was a ‘social reality’ (p. 11), but the ‘realities’ that surrounded money were a plurality since information had not been distributed symmetrically. For readers not specialised in these periods, it would have been desirable to hear more about the cost of this asymmetry.

Beginning the section on the period running through the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, Michel Morineau's paper is a synthesis of the three functions of money that are traditionally considered fundamental: a measure of value, an instrument of exchange, a store of value. In chapter 6, Jean-Noel Barrandon reveals new facts about the use of a chemical method of tracing gold with palladium, including the fact that in the eighteenth century Brazilian gold accounted for 40 per cent of the French mint. The contribution of Carlos Marichal focuses on universal currencies in the Ancien Régime, especially the Spanish silver piastre, which functioned as a universal currency from Europe to Latin America during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and all the way to China and India. Zeynep Bilge Yildirim makes clear, using the legal register record of numerous cities, the complex features of the monetary system in the Ottoman Empire, where special-purpose money circulated. Jerome Jambu traces three major changes and the creation of money experienced in modern France (1577, 1640–1 and 1795 during the French Revolution), drawing an analogy with the contemporary change from the franc to the euro. Christian Morrisson improves on estimations of the eighteenth-century French economy, integrating monetary and real factors, and proposes new perspectives regarding the growth/stagnation debate on the period. Of the various subjects treated in this section, the majority of these papers stress the great diversity in the functions and purposes of money, which is much wider than one would imagine from classical economics textbooks. As for topics to be studied further, the reviewer fully agrees with the conclusion of Michel Morineau that ‘we now know what money does, yet do not know what money is’ (p. 96).

In the third section, Nicolas Stoskoff follows the path taken by an exchange bank founded in Marseille and Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century. Dating back to an experiment by Robert Owen, this type of bank operated under the influence of nineteenth-century socialism. The paper by Audrey Soria reveals how the Chamber of Commerce of Lyon managed the monetary shortcomings during World War I with the issuance of special banknotes. Jean-Paul Domin analyses the debate on the monetary monopoly after the Savoy attachment to France in 1860, between the central banking camp on the one hand and the free banking camp on the other. Olivier Darne and Claude Diebolt's contribution is an institutional study as well as a cliometric test on the monetary reserve of the Reichsbank, which concludes that there was dynamic movement of the reserve under the impact of cyclical crises. Bertrand Blancheton and Christian Bordes's paper finds a frame of reference within theoretical debates on the 1969 franc devaluation; a ‘keynéso-classique’ synthesis regarding the balance of payments adjustment mechanism. Finally, Béatrice Touchelay traces the discourses of the Conseil National du Patronat Français (CNPF), the most representative French business organisation, founded in 1946, on foreign trade deregulation. Many of the papers in this section present research on the ‘discourse’ on money. In other words, the question of money shifts from ‘what is money?’ to ‘what did they say about money?’ This shift is important in a historical sense, but the question may be explored with empirical studies, like the cliometric analysis in chapter 14.

By drawing all these wide-ranging subjects together in one volume, this book has succeeded in presenting several clear-cut dichotomies: real indexes vs monetary indexes; the Currency school vs the Banking school; gold vs silver; public intervention vs market mechanisms; central banking vs free banking; Keynesian vs Monetarist approaches, and so on. However, this success leads us to other questions: was the real world and the monetary world so symmetrical? How about bimetallism? Were the government and the private sector so antagonistic? Some of the papers in this volume have proposed brilliant answers to these questions, although the framework of the book seems to have been developed classically. In this context, greater attention should have been paid to the monetary theory of Friedrich von Hayek, especially his insightful work, the Denationalisation of Money (1976). It is certain, however, that anyone who wishes to answer these questions in the future will refer to this excellent volume.