*David McNally* # Progressive Summary This is a very clearly written book on a complex topic. It makes an effort to trace abstractions back to their bodily consequences. This is no mean feat when it comes to the greatest abstraction of all – money. > Where money is concerned, I submit that every layer of its sedimentation is mingled with the blood of slaves, of soldiers, of the colonized, of the exploited and oppressed. # Definitions # Chapter Notes ## Chapter 1 - war, slavery, and ancient markets Sixth century BCE Greece produced "the first ever words for and thought about *money*." - [Seaford 2012 - Monetisation and the Genesis of the Western Subject](zotero://select/items/1_DGGKRPZB) This was a conceptual revolution. In pre-monetary societies, a person's wealth would be described as an inventory a list of things. With the invention of general-purpose money, a person's wealth could be described by a single number. > In the Old Testament, for instance, Solomon’s wealth is described by enumerating all the specific things that entered into his daily provisions—flour, meal, cattle, sheep, goats, deer, gazelles, roebucks, and fowl—as well as various items he received on a monthly basis, among them barley and straw for his horses (I Kings 4:22–28). “From the Greeks onward, we find a new way of speaking and of thinking. Now a person might state the entirety of a household’s possessions in terms of money, as no member of a premonetary society would ever do.” - David M. Schaps, The Invention of Coinage and the Monetization of Ancient Greece (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) Aristotle said that money (*nomisma*) is "the measure of everything". Homeric Greece operated on an aristocratic gift economy. Social status was tied to "competitive generosity". The term “competitive generosity” is from Oswyn Murray, Early Greece (London: William Collins, 1980). People were driven to accumulate wealth in order to disperse it. > Confronted with similar values in the gift-giving economy on the Solomon Islands, one appalled self-styled anthropologist proclaimed such actions “absurd.” “The only profit a man can make in a deal in this absurd society is a reputation for generosity,” she wrote. - Caroline Mytinger, Headhunting in the Solomon Islands (New York: Macmillan, 1942) Greek word for freedom, *eleutheros*, actually means belonging. To be stripped of one's freedom was to be torn from one's community, like a slave. # Quotes # References [Schaps 2004 - The invention of coinage and the monetization of ancient Greece](zotero://select/items/1_QAT829MF)