Author: jonwuka

Studying money is very hard. I’ve looked at a few different attempts to define it and I have skimmed through Geoffrey Ingham’s The Nature of Money. His answer to the question implied in the book’s title is complex and I don’t grasp it well enough yet to explain it. One thing I do understand, however, is that he believes that the value of money is primarily determined by society. I agree with this wholeheartedly. But as far as the social mechanics of this interaction, I don’t know that I will find the answer laid out in Ingham’s work. I might find it elsewhere, or I might have skipped over it and I’ll find it when I make another pass through the work.

I say that by way of introducing this blog’s topic, which is finding (or creating) a distinction between monopoly, province, and fief as subdivisions of a state. What I’m interested in is how money works as part of the state-society’s machinery of coercion. To understand that better, I wanted to understand how the economy is broken up from the sense of power relations. The decision to subdivide territory and establish regional administrations, and the type of regional administrations established, are all questions that are deeply tied in with the economy, even though they are not classically economic concerns.