DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Good Money

Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821

George Selgin author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:The University of Michigan Press

Published:1st Aug '08

Currently unavailable, our supplier has not provided us a restock date

Good Money cover

This book looks at private enterprise and the foundation of modern coinage."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.Historian George Selgin presents a lively tale of enterprising manufacturers, technological innovations, and struggles over the right to coin legal money.

"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"

  • Commended for Independent Publisher Book Awards (Finance/Invest/Econ) 2009

ISBN: 9780472116317

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

400 pages