Brendan Greeley

He never touched a coin.

He never touched even a banknote.

He basically lived his life on the ledger of his bookseller.

You know, it gets slightly more complicated than that, but not that different.

So there is a financial historian named Rebecca Spang, who I've found profoundly helpful in this.

And she wrote a beautiful book called Stuff and Money at the Time of the French Revolution.

And in that book, she argues, I'm paraphrasing, that any woman buying bread in a market knew as much about money as David Hume.

I think that's absolutely true.

And so one of the things that I've tried to do in this book is sort of follow Rebecca Spang's approach and be absolutely ruthless about saying they paid for that.

How?

What was the actual payment?

What did they actually do, right?

What went across the barrelhead in return for the bread?

And the thing that we find again and again and again is at the smallest levels,

Money is credit.

The coin does not sit underneath the money.

It sits on the edge.

It's useful for clearing sometimes.

But, you know, in every market that I've looked at, you know, when we look at Annapolis, Maryland, at the time of the revolution, what you had was shopkeepers kept ledgers.

And those ledgers served as money.