Where does money come from, and how did it get that way?

Most people assume that it all started with bartering, but the barter theory, popularized by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations — which supposes that human societies traded goods for one another before developing currency — has been widely disproven. No example of a pre-currency barter economy has ever been discovered anywhere on Earth.

Quite the opposite, in fact. The late 19th-century European anthropologists and ethnographers who conducted field studies among what were then perceived to be the “primitive tribes” of Africa, Asia, Australia, and Oceania reported…

The world’s first tweet is now for sale as an NFT, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced last week. In an article about the news for CNN Business, writer Jazmin Goodwin details how NFTs (that is, non-fungible tokens) have become a way to buy and sell what were once unique and ephemeral spots of time—not only Jack Dorsey’s primal tweet (bids for which have now reached $2.5 million), but videos of famous dunks by Lebron James, and innumerable other “moments” that bear commodification.

Time itself is now for sale, and it surprises us not at all.

In ancient Europe, a visit…

For the past thirty years, Paul Freedman and I have followed the origins, growth, and proliferation of American food culture. Paul is a Medievalist, and has written one of my favorite food books of all time, along with a recent best-seller. He is arguably America’s foremost expert on restaurants. I have worked on a different track, more focussed on food politics and food insecurity.

We have benefited as food studies became a part of academic departments, as chefs became international celebrities, as food media grew from a niche to a mainstay of cable television and the internet, and as food…

Before there was such a thing as a market economy, metals defined money. Sparkling rocks belie an ugly history, but one worth re-visiting as the precious metals sector of the market reaches for a new era of dominance.

Bloomberg News recently reported that “industrial metal prices are powering to the highest in years,” sparked by upcoming legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions for vehicles, post-pandemic demand for home electronics, and an across-the-board desire by manufacturers of all stripes for next-wave batteries. …

An epic amount of ink has been spilled over the past few weeks about Reddit’s WallStreetBets and wild trading of options for meme stocks like GameStop. Much of this ink describes meme stocks as a unique phenomenon with little or no precedent. But the history of the financial markets is actually filled with precedents for meme stocks. Sure, nobody was buying stock in video game retail companies in ancient Greece. But believe it or not, the very first option trader in ancient Greece blazed a trail followed by Gamestonkers. …