How Money Shapes Our World

This book uses currency as a starting point to explore the evolution of China's and the world's economies over the past three thousand years. Following the chronological order of Chinese history, the author divides the book into six chapters, each split into a section on China and a section on the rest of the world. It introduces representative currencies from China and abroad, including bronze cowrie shells, the five-zhu coin, Byzantine gold coins, the US dollar, the British pound, and the renminbi. Through these currencies, we will feel the grandeur of the Tang dynasty, the smoke of battle in the Ming dynasty, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the ascent of the United States, and the fresh economic landscape at the founding of the People's Republic of China...

These small coins bear the ambitions of emperors and generals, along with the power struggles between them. What patterns of economic policy and national rise and fall do they conceal? What social changes and aspects of people's lives do they reflect? This book will lead us to uncover the nature of currency, seeking a world of possibilities within a tiny space, and open up a new history of the global economy from a unique perspective.