Savage Money

The mark of a civilized economy is national money; the English pound, the Australian dollar, the Indian rupee. The mark of a savage economy is untamed money in the form of cowrie shells, silver, gold and so on. The state's power is critically dependent on its ability to domesticate savage money and to reassert its control. This is a constant struggle and especially so for an imperial state with ambitions of international statehood. The English pound conquered cowries and silver at the end of the last century, and the American dollar almost succeeded in domesticating gold, the last vestige of savage money. However, a new era of savage money is dawning in the twilight of the American empire. ''Money'' has an equivocation rather than a definition. It is a chameleon-like symbol which is forever changing as mercantile relations between people vary over time and place. This volume is not simply another general theory of world system. It is a theoretically and ethnographically informed collection of essays which opens up new questions through an examination of concrete cases, covering global and local questions of political economy.