Changes

|title=Money: The Unauthorised Biography

|author=Felix Martin

|publisher=Vintage

|date=July 2014

|website=http://felixmartin.org/

|summary=The secret or not so secret history of money, explored partly through various financial crises through the ages. Despite the sub-title, this is first and foremost a work on economics.

}}

Occasionally books are not exactly what they seem. When I picked this up, read the blurb and began the contents inside, I was expecting a kind of biography or history of money through the ages. The opening chapter, a brief sketch of the economy of the Pacific island of Yap and how it worked, seemed to confirm this. It tells us how in the late nineteenth century Yap, east of the Philippine Islands, had an unwieldy coinage consisting of stone wheels around 12ft in diameter, called fei. The population did not carry these around, let alone own them like we possess pounds and pence, as they were part of a sophisticated system of credit management.