Much of what is presented as new in money and payments has been tried before: constraints and chokepoints move from one layer to another, but they rarely disappear. For this reason, I’m deeply convinced that financial history is the most reliable way to tell which problems are structural and which belong to a particular technology.
This list contains all the titles I’ve identified to build a solid understanding of financial history. Most are seminal works I expect to stay relevant for decades; a few are recent books that have already earned their place. It’s a living canon: I’ll add, remove and reorder books as I read and write.
Foundations
- A Financial History of Western Europe (1984), Charles P. Kindleberger
- A Concise History of International Finance (2015), Larry Neal
- A History of Interest Rates (1963), Sidney Homer and Richard Sylla
- This Time Is Different (2009), Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff
- Venice: A Maritime Republic (1973), Frederic C. Lane
- The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi
- The New Lombard Street (2010), Perry Mehrling
What money is
- Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (1988), Peter Spufford
- Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice (1985), Frederic C. Lane and Reinhold C. Mueller
- L’invenzione dei soldi (2013), Alessandro Marzo Magno
Private money
- Free Banking in Britain (1984), Lawrence H. White
- Good Money (2008), George Selgin
- The Money Problem (2016), Morgan Ricks
Payments, clearing and networks
- Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean (2012), Jessica L. Goldberg
- Fountain of Fortune (1996), Richard von Glahn
- The Promise and Peril of Credit (2019), Francesca Trivellato
- Private Money and Public Currencies (1994), Marie-Thérèse Boyer-Xambeu, Ghislain Deleplace and Lucien Gillard
Credit
- Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (1986), Jacques Le Goff (link pending)
- The Economy of Obligation (1998), Craig Muldrew
- Dark Matter Credit (2019), Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal
- Currency and Credit (1919), Ralph G. Hawtrey
- Financing the American Dream (1999), Lendol Calder
- Consumer Lending in France and America (2014), Gunnar Trumbull (link pending)
- Controlling Credit (2018), Eric Monnet
- Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (1986), Hyman P. Minsky
Banks and central banking
- The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank (1963), Raymond de Roover
- The Evolution of Central Banking: Theory and History (2017), Stefano Ugolini
- Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802), Henry Thornton
- Lombard Street (1873), Walter Bagehot
Sovereign debt and the state
- States of Credit (2011), David Stasavage
- Lending to the Borrower from Hell (2014), Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth
- The Financial Revolution in England (1967), P. G. M. Dickson
Markets, bubbles and crises
- The Rise of Financial Capitalism (1991), Larry Neal
- Manias, Panics and Crashes (1978), Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Z. Aliber
- A Monetary History of the United States (1963), Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz
- The World in Depression (1973), Charles P. Kindleberger
International monetary system
- The Long Twentieth Century (1994), Giovanni Arrighi
- Money and Empire (1974), Marcello de Cecco
- A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), John Maynard Keynes
- Gold and the Dollar Crisis (1960), Robert Triffin
- Globalizing Capital (1996), Barry Eichengreen
- States and the Reemergence of Global Finance (1994), Eric Helleiner
- The Re-emergence of Global Finance (2006), Gary Burn
Weaponisation of finance
- Currency and Coercion (1995), Jonathan Kirshner
- Planning Armageddon (2012), Nicholas A. Lambert
- The Economic Weapon (2022), Nicholas Mulder
- Treasury’s War (2013), Juan C. Zarate
- Underground Empire (2023), Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman
- Chokepoints (2025), Edward Fishman – How US sanctions legal infrastructure developed and was used over time