of a social historian
There are two pervasive myths about money, and they’re both wrong.
One is that money is simple. That its beauty lies in its simplicity. It’s just a token, with no meaning beyond an abstract numerical value. This enables the entire world of economic exchange without the hassle of bartering. It also allows us to buy our way out of social convention, since there is no difference between the money in one person’s pocket and another’s wallet. The trouble is that this function of money as a neutral token is only possible because we assign that meaning to it, and by the time we’ve done that we’ve also brought along our own social and cultural baggage too.
The other is that, once money enters the equation, it rides roughshod over all else. This second myth is the paranoid cousin of the first. We see this in the desire to keep a distance from the grubby business of money, distrust of those making a profit or the fear of doing business with family and friends. There are no shortage of times when these worries are entirely justified. This was the scepticism with which I began researching how people in Britain accessed medical treatment before the National Health Service. However what I found, and I later learned to be in line with the insights of the new economic sociology, is that financial concerns can be involved without dominating. More broadly, economic decisions are rarely successfully or completely disentangled from their social and cultural setting.
The social function and meaning of money has become an intellectual thread running through my work. You’ll find it discussed in the following blog posts…
The Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution (CHORD) at the University of Wolverhampton will be hosted a workshop that exploring the social, activist and communal aspects of retail from a historical perspective on Thursday 9 May 2019. Please find the programme and information on registration below. PROGRAMME 10.00 – 10.30 COFFEE AND WELCOME 10.30 …
For a good few years now, I've been popping up at conferences and workshops and seminars, making the case for adopting a cross-disciplinary way of thinking about money in modern life. So I guess I'd put my views on money histories on the radar by the time the Social History Society and the Economic History …
Continue reading "The Social and Economic Life of Money: From the Medieval to the Modern"
This is all about women's historic relationship with money. That thought didn't occur to me until quite late in the day. But in many respects that's what my latest academic journal article is all about. In itself, it's further discussion of the means-tested pre-NHS hospital patient payment schemes and the social workers who administered them. …
Musings 