Good Money tells the fascinating story of British manufacturers' challenge to the Crown's monopoly on coinage. In the 1780s, when the Industrial Revolution was gathering momentum, the Royal Mint failed to produce enough small-denomination coinage for factory owners to pay their workers. As the currency shortage threatened to derail industrial progress, manufacturers began to mint custom-made coins, called "tradesman's tokens." Rapidly gaining wide acceptance, these tokens served as the nation's most popular currency for wages and retail sales until 1821, when the Crown outlawed all moneys except its own. Economist George Selgin presents a lively tale of enterprising manufacturers, technological innovations, alternative currencies, and struggles over the right to coin legal money. George Selgin is BB&T Professor of Free Market Thought, College of Business and Economics, West Virginia University and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California (www.independent.org). "In lucid, enjoyable, often humorous language, Selgin takes us from the 'dark satanic mills' to the backstreet haunts of the eighteenth-century counterfeiter and the private, legitimate mints, set up to address a problem the Royal Mint could or would not—the production of safe small change for the people. His cast of characters is large and auspicious: Thomas Williams, James Watt, John Westwood, and Matthew Boulton. And Selgin's understanding of eighteenth-century economic theory and practice is absolute, allowing him to write with verve and clarity."
—Richard Doty, Curator of Numismatics, Smithsonian Institution, and author of The Soho Mint and the Industrialization of Money (1998) "George Selgin's story of how private enterprise solved a monetary problem that threatened seriously to retard the Industrial Revolution is a splendid piece of historical analysis. He has done an incredible job of unearthing all of the details of what went on in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It is a fine example of historical research."
—Milton Friedman, Former Senior Research Fellow, the Hoover Institution, and recipient of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "George Selgin reveals the personalities and schemes intimately involved in creating the modern monetary system."
—Jack Weatherford, DeWitt Wallace Professor of Anthropology, Macalester College (Minnesota), and author of The History of Money: From Sandstone to Cyberspace (1997) |
