The central money problem of Philip was the conflict between the spending for the defense of his Habsburg inheritance, mainly in the Low Countries, and the resistance of cities to pay for this, within Castile’s implicit constitution from a medieval tradition. The bankers, mainly from Genoa, jumped at the opportunity to provide the wheels of finance between the tax collection at the center, Castile, and the spending at the periphery. These actors are presented in this chapter.

This chapter analyzes the different banking models that were debated and adopted by the elites of the various Latin American nations after midcentury. The examples of the financial and monetary institutions of Europe were influential, but they were not simply replicated. In fact, there was a creative process of adaptation of foreign models of banking organization and regulation that were adjusted to local and regional situations in each country in a prolonged process of trial and error. In Chile and Colombia the advocates of the free banking model tended to gain the upper hand, whereas in Argentina and Brazil the supporters of a single bank of issue tended to dominate. The intense political and financial discussions in each country revealed strong differences between orthodox theorists, in favor of a strict gold standard, and pragmatists, who preferred the flexibility of inconvertibility. These confrontations remained characteristic of many later episodes in Latin American financial history and resonate down to the present day.

This chapter analyses socialist financial systems and their common features of mono-banks, fiscal deficits and printing money to finance these. The chapter also looks at the plural society.

Chapter 3 reviews Swift’s rapid emergence as England’s chief foreign policy propagandist and analyzes his ethical, religious, political, geopolitical, and economic reasons for opposing the War of Spanish Succession. He became a Tory partisan after two recessions and adopted the ideology of the old propertied elite against the new capitalist elite. He revealed a nativist strain and opposed foreign influences, including national debt and continental military involvement. But he did not abandon basic Whiggish political principles like rule by consent or the right to resist tyranny. He defended emergency executive action not as a pretext for absolute power but as a limited constitutional device for resolving an immediate and objective crisis, notably abroad. Unilateral powers can easily be abused but Swift shows himself concerned about that risk in a way that is not characteristic of authoritarians. His opposition to Dutch national debt went along with opposition to French power politics, revealing middle ground.

Implicitly addressing the French Revolution, most of these Tales advocated avoiding revolution in Britain by changing the culture and composition of the ruling class. Critiquing the mores and rule of the aristocracy, Eliza Parsons, Maria Hunter, Mary Ann Hanway, Mary Charlton and anonymous others advocated admitting capable, genteel, nouveau riche merchants and professionals, or sometimes humane and competent country gentlemen, into the ruling elite. They also intimated that elite culture should consist of the proto-Victorian values championed by their exemplary merchants, professionals and/or country gentlemen and independent working women and by the marriage of “manners and morals” they modeled. Placing their exemplary protagonists in the wealthy mercantile, professional and gentry classes and showing these groups socializing and intermarrying accords with recent scholarly accounts of the conduct of these classes in the provinces, as they began to consolidate into a Victorian upper middle class.

Chapter 5 proposes that friendship is one of the founding principles of, and one of the main reasons for writing, familial letters. It focuses on the exchange of letters between Keats and his friend the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, suggesting that the exchange itself sustained but also threatened the friendship because of its engagement with a paradoxical logic of reciprocity that governs both friendship and letter-writing. The chapter pays particular attention to the inherent contingency of epistolary friendship – friendship that is supplemented or sustained by epistolary contact – in the case of Keats’s mutually flattering but sometimes difficult relationship with a man who shared the poet’s sense of artistic ambition while lacking his talent and genius. As a form of gift exchange, the interchange of letters between two friends may be said to be governed by the economics of an implicit but difficult and ultimately paradoxical reciprocity.

The chapter demonstrates for the first time that silversmiths served as the arbiters of value in Mexico City. They persuaded officials to trust them, to allow them to govern their affairs, by preserving the silver standard. It was their way of protecting the crown’s money, reals minted at the House of Coins that served as a global currency during the seventeenth century. Examining the lives of silversmiths shows how residents used silver locally in an economy that operated on credit and with cash. Silversmiths made objects that had intrinsic and monetary value, so residents relied on them for investment advice and to understand the crown’s complicated fiscal policy.

The conclusion discusses valuation, the activity of giving value to things and people, to stress residents’ economic and political choices.

Social democracy may sometimes present itself as technocratic, but within its wider world of meaning, there are beliefs that speak to more radical change, even upheaval. The world of social democratic ideology is one of possibility, rather than something narrowly circumscribed. Using Charles Taylor’s concept of ‘common meanings’, this chapter explores the multifaceted nature of social democracy, which is significant for understanding how adaptable it has been as an ideological tradition. In elaborating what social democrats – and people on the centre-left more broadly – can think, the chapter presents analyses of literature from the twentieth and twenty-first century, with novels and poetry as representations of our social world. Rather than making empirical claims about what social democratic ideology is right now in a particular country or political party, the chapter explores the possible beliefs – very recognisable ones – of social democrats, and how those beliefs shed some light on the everyday dilemmas that people on the left of politics encounter. Three broad, common meanings of clear relevance to the world of social democracy are identified: money, class, and indignation. All three are discussed in relation to dilemmas social democratic actors must consider in contemporary politics.

This chapter explores anti-utopian satire in bestselling British author Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Like the anti-chivalric satire of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Voltaire, the Discworld books celebrate pragmatism and local knowledge rather than political ideals. The Discworld is alive with vivid utopian impulses, however, the chapter argues that they frequently lack concrete detail. Pratchett is more concerned with constructing a colourful world of humour, heroism, and villainy. The Ankh-Morpork books reflect on the processes of historical change, accelerating a medieval city-state into liberal industrial modernity via an array of fantastically estranged forms. The city itself, however, fails to actualise into a utopian vision of the future. Rather, Pratchett’s fantasy series articulates a deep suspicion of the kind of political radicalism often associated with utopian thinking. Through a close reading of two books in the series, Night Watch (2002) and Making Money (2007), the chapter considers how Pratchett’s fantasy world laments structural violence whilst lampooning utopian remedies to such violence, such as democratic elections, trade unions, industrial action, or new kinds of post-capitalist value.

Chapter 2 turns towards the neighbourhood of Ituura. It introduces my field site in detail by exploring cases of local youth who are said to have been ‘wasted’ by alcoholism. In contrast to those who are said to have ‘given up’ on their futures, other young men are shown to embrace discourses of moral fortitude to sustain their hopes for the future while working for low, piecemeal wages in the informal economy. Such youth claim that one must be ‘bold to make it’. Engaging with anthropological discussion on waithood and hope, the chapter shows how young men cultivate moral fortitude through an ethics of endurance – a hope for hope itself, a way of sustaining belief in their own long-term futures that involves economising practices, prayer, and avoidance of one’s peers who are seen to be a source of temptation and pressure to consume.

Chapter 5 explores the construction of women, especially young women, as dubious and untrustworthy figures in male discourse, a source of cynicism and doubt about kinship’s future. It captures men’s fears about ‘greedy’ women and ‘gold diggers’ who only want to marry men in order to expropriate their wealth. At the same time, the chapter explores counter-discourses of young women getting by in a world of male failure, their relations with their male kin, and their ambitions to become successful ‘hustlers’ in their own right. Speaking to regional literature on love, marriage, and youth relationships, it explores the gendered tensions created by a world of masculine destitution, illuminating male fears about the capacity of women to exploit their ‘in-betweenness’ to acquire patrilineal land.