Money and Society

Abstract

In its most basic sense, money is a means of measuring and mediating value as understood by human society. It does not exist by nature, but by the imaginative impulse of those who need to engage in acts of exchange. For this reason diverse forms of money have taken shape throughout history across the globe (and continue to do so).1 Money, it might be said, is the creation of society, and especially of more complex societies marked by diverse interactions. But the length of and variety in this relationship mean that it has often come full circle: money has profoundly affected society, and not always in the ways one might expect. The traditional interpretation of the influence of money in modern society – which has in turn affected readings of other areas and periods – goes back to foundational figures in history and the social sciences such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, and Marcel Mauss, and holds that the rise of monetization in and of itself would erode more affective human bonds.2 But an important strand of recent scholarship developed by anthropologists and sociologists of the modern world has pruned back this narrative; instead, ways of incorporating money into social processes have come to the fore.3 Calculation and quantification are just one part of the story, and by no means always the dominant one, be it in the modern United States, Africa, Indonesia, or the Pacific Islands. The impact of money on any particular community depends on many more variables than the presence of money alone. The application of this approach to medieval Europe is the central goal of this chapter. How did medieval people actually view and use money, and what impact did it have on their society (and vice versa)? This is, of course, a vast topic. Coins, ingots, and other means of exchange only became money when they factored into valuation or exchange, in relation to abstracted units of account.