History 301 - Col: History of Money&Finance

This seminar explores the history of money and finance in modern Britain, from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth. It addresses this history not from the perspective of classical economics or political economy, but rather from that of cultural history. Using a variety of primary and secondary source readings, students will learn how such things as coins, bills of exchange and the Bank of England relate to questions of virtue, respectability, and the modern self, and they will consider how Britons crafted new identities and negotiated changing social relations using the objects and practices of monetary and financial exchange.