From Barter Trade to E-Cash: Continuity and Change in the History of Monetary Transformation Processes.

According to the widely-held assumptions in the prevailing political economy literature, national and international monetary governance structures are currently undergoing a process of fundamental and revolutionary change. Developments such as the introduction of the euro in the European Union, increasing dollarization in various parts of the world, or the evolution of electronic money seem to call into question the conventional relationship between nation state and territorial monetary governance. The new monetary geography appears to be globalized or deterritorialized and governance of money is radically changing. This paper seeks to develop an alternative conceptualization of these monetary transformation processes. While the empirical facts of a shifting monetary landscape are not in dispute, I argue that the current developments of globalization and deterritorialization are quite consistent and comparable with other historical processes of change in monetary governance. The often assumed distinction between a national and a post-national monetary landscape is exaggerated. Starting from a definition of money as a social relation ? instead of a material or economic category ? the paper adopts a macro-historical perspective and compares four historical episodes of monetary transformation: the shift from a barter to a money economy, the development of financial capitalism during the early stages of modernity, the process of national monetary unification during the nineteenth century and the current deterritorialization processes. Applying an agency-structure framework, the paper uncovers similarities across these cases in the way the interaction between politics and markets has repeatedly molded monetary governance. In particular, the paper interprets current transformation processes as part of a modernization process that resulted in greater levels of abstraction in all spheres of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]