Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution

About this book

Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century StudiesA Financial Times Best History Book of the YearA Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Rebecca L. Spang, who revolutionized our understanding of the restaurant, has written a new history of money. It uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation, the assignats--a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as "circulating land"--to demonstrate that money is as much a social and political mediator as it is an economic instrument. Following the assignats from creation to abandonment, Spang shows them to be subject to the same slippages between policies and practice, intentions and outcomes, as other human inventions. "This is a quite brilliant, assertive book."--Patrice Higonnet, Times Literary Supplement "Brilliant...What Spang] proposes is nothing less than a new conceptualization of the revolution...She has provided historians--and not just those of France or the French Revolution--with a new set of lenses with which to view the past."--Arthur Goldhammer, Bookforum " Spang] views the French Revolution from rewardingly new angles by analyzing the cultural significance of money in the turbulent years of European war, domestic terror and inflation."--Tony Barber, Financial Times

Details

Format

Paperback

ISBN-13

9780674975422

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published

February 20, 2017

Pages

360

Weight

13.6 oz

Subject

Business & Economics