An Anthropology of Money: A Critical Introduction shows how our present monetary system
was imposed by elites and how they benefit from it. The book poses the question: how, by
looking at different forms of money, can we appreciate that they have different effects? The
authors demonstrate how modern money requires perpetual growth, an increase in
inequality, environmental devastation, increasing commoditization, and, consequently, the
perpetual consumption of ever more stuff. These are not intrinsic features of money, but …

While the banking crisis alerted many to the damaging effects our financial structure can
have on social wellbeing, how many of us go to the deeper cause of the malaise, namely
money itself? For, as Di Muzio and Robbins put it in this groundbreaking new book,'different
kinds of money or monetary systems produce very different effects in society and serve to
illustrate how we can't take money for granted'(6). As its name implies, this book is very
different to the largely technical treatments of the subject by financiers and economists …