Now here is a book. It instructs and provokes and entertains. Even its mistakes are worthwhile. The secret of “The History of Money” is in the subtitle: “a story of humanity.” For David McWilliams, an ...

A short history of paper money: “Kublai Khan, said Marco Polo, had ‘a more extensive command of treasure than any other sovereign in the universe’. There were no jangling pockets of coins in Kanbalu.

Learned, lively and often irreverent, David McWilliams’s “The History of Money” is rich with surprising details about currency, then and now. By Alexandra Jacobs When you purchase an independently ...

In the modern world, it would be almost impossible to function without having some sort of paper currency. Paper money originated as a new form of economy and was first developed by a Chinese emperor ...