Stanford Humanities Center
Jon Cooper is a PhD candidate in History at Stanford University. He holds a BA in History and an MSc in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, where he developed an interest in the emergence of political economy in early modern Britain and its empire.
SHC Project
Dealing with Money: The Invention of Economics in England, 1544–1623
“Dealing with Money” sheds new light on why a radical new approach to thinking about human sociality and governance developed in early seventeenth-century England. Drawing on intensive archival research, technical work in monetary theory, and literature in financial, legal, and social history, it argues that the rise of economics cannot be explained as resulting from the rise of capitalism. Rather, it involved the repudiation of a preexisting paradigm for thinking about monetary relations that had developed amid the commercial revolution of the High Middle Ages, predicated on semiotic integrity, just equivalence, and above all, the prohibition of usury. This framework slowly began to unravel during the unprecedented monetary crisis that afflicted England in the later sixteenth century. Debasement, expanding financial markets, and the subjection of international trade to a regime of floating exchange rates then forced English commentators to confront a profound new question. Inspired by currents in reformed and late humanist thought, they began to ask what could explain, and thereby promise to stabilize, the pricing of money in terms of itself. Paradoxically, the most persuasive way of answering this question was to abstract away from money entirely—to explain interest and exchange rates as the result of a deeper, non-monetary sphere of reality, governed by what became known as the laws of capital and value.
