Do you know where your money is? If you read ‘money’ and immediately think of cash, then there's a very fair chance that you’ve just pictured notes and coins in a purse or a wallet, or perhaps imagined a big steel vault in a heavily secured basement room in a bank. Either way, you’ve likely sought to reassure yourself that your money is safe. But if you read ‘money’ and instead thought of digital numbers on a smartphone screen, or more imaginatively still, considered your pension, savings and investments, then there's an equally good chance that you don't know exactly where your money is at all. And this suggests a far more fundamental question. If you don't know where your money is, then how do you know what your money is doing?

While most people feel supremely confident that they know precisely what money is, and what they would choose to do should they suddenly have more of it, they are equally uncertain and anxious when it comes to the seemingly more complex matters of finance. At least a part of the problem here is that we tend to use these two terms interchangeably and in different contexts, often misunderstanding their meaning because of it. This is not just a problem for everyday conversations – it creates problems for those of us who study it and who seek to make sense of the way that we think about and use money, and the ways in which financial systems are developed around money.

Throughout this book, our study investigates the stories and myths about money that have led to the creation of different systems of finance, from the eranos loans of ancient Greece to the FinTech and Crypto revolutions of the early 21st century. In so doing, we suggest that finance has not always been the preserve of the elite professional, but is rather something that develops in different ways, bound by time and cultures, and often alters as a response to crisis. The shape of finance at any given moment in history and across cultures, then, depends upon the social relations and moral values that hold those societies together