An Evening with David McWilliams

Author, journalist, economist and podcast host David McWilliams joins us for an evening of conversation in the JL Greene Theatre on Monday, November 17 to launch his latest book The History of Money, followed by a signing and reception in the Devlin Café.

In The History of Money, McWilliams takes us across the world, from the birthplace of money in ancient Babylon to the beginning of trade along the Silk Road, from Marrakech markets to Wall Street. Along the way, we meet a host of innovators, emperors, frauds, and speculators, who have disrupted society and transformed the way we live. Filled with memorable anecdotes, and with a foreword by Michael Lewis, The History of Money is an essential, extremely readable history of humanity’s most consequential invention.

"Money has found its greatest biographer. The subject of this book has spent most of its life on the run from being well understood. At least until now. In this swashbuckling epic of grand sweeps and tight close ups, David McWilliams brilliantly excavates the history of money, which is our history too. Evolution and revolution. He is a master storyteller of rare talent."
—Bono

“‘Most economists do not really understand money… They take the fun out of it.’ Thus begins Irish economist David McWilliams’s rollicking ride through the pecuniary past. From the 20,000-year-old Ishango Bone (the first known accounting instrument) to today’s M-Pesa (Kenya’s mobile phone payments system), the reader is whisked at the speed of a Weimar printing press through the history of financial evolution. If Flann O’Brien and Milton Friedman had ever collaborated, this might have been the result. I was entertained. But I also learned.”
—Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money

"It’s a crime, it can’t buy me love, it’s the root of all evil, it makes the world go around, it’s what I want. Money has long been the subject of song and sayings. And now, at last, we have The History of Money: a clear and endlessly fascinating explanation of what this is all about and how it all works."
—Steven Pinker, Harvard University, author of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…

"A cracking book that is as enjoyable as it is readable."
—Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

“If, as David McWilliams complains, economists take the fun out of money, then he is the exception that proves the rule: a man who could not write a boring sentence if he tried, and who, in this brilliantly informative and entertaining book, has done his subject splendid justice."
—Tom Holland, author of Dominion