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The first recorded personal name in human history didn’t belong to a king or a priest. It belonged to a Sumerian brewer named Kashim and his name was inscribed on a clay tablet to document a loan he’d taken out.
Some 5,000 years ago, he borrowed some barley to brew a batch of beer — and, remarkably, wrote down his debts.
There was just one small problem: the interest rate was 33%, and time was running out. Could he brew the beer fast enough? Would he get paid? Would the price of barley crash and wipe him out?
“We can picture Kushim, late at night, praying for a bumper harvest,” writes economist David McWilliams in “The History of Money: A Story of Humanity” (Henry Holt, out Tuesday).
Kushim’s financial anxieties feel remarkably modern because they are. The interest rate on his loan wasn’t arbitrary — it was “the price of time, expressed by money,” McWilliams writes. It represented the lender’s calculation of risk, opportunity cost, and the borrower’s desperation. This is how interest works, whether you’re a Bronze Age brewer or a millennial with student debt.
Flash forward to Pompeii, where worship took a distinctly commercial turn. On 19 of the 29 beautifully ornate mosaics archaeologists have uncovered in the ancient city, a recurring image appears. It’s a winged man carrying a bag of coins — the god Mercury.
He was held in high regard not because of any Olympian prowess, but because he was the god of commerce—“a negotiator, salesman, charmer, a trusted partner as well as a trickster, moneylender, and dealmaker,” writes McWilliams.
The Romans didn’t just worship money; they weaponized credit in ways that feel eerily contemporary. They had banks, bankers, mortgages, and speculative real estate bubbles. And, in 33 CE, they experienced what McWilliams calls “the world’s first credit crisis.”
Emperor Tiberius was enjoying semi-retirement in Capri when news of an alleged coup shattered his peace. A young pretender named Sejanus had rallied senators and aristocrats to overthrow him. Tiberius, shrewd and ruthless, smoked out the conspirators.
Once he identified the traitors, he had Sejanus killed — and took things even further.
“Shaken by the sheer number of senators prepared to betray him, Tiberius moved against them in the place it hurt them most: their pockets,” McWilliams writes. The Senate, it turned out, was running a massive lending racket, borrowing at low rates in Rome and lending across the provinces at usurious rates. Tiberius passed a law forcing senators to keep a percentage of their income in Italian lands, which meant they had to dump their speculative provincial properties immediately. Land prices collapsed. Debts remained. Balance sheets imploded.
“The empire of credit was in the middle of a property boom, the treasury was full, and low interest rates had pushed up land prices,” writes McWilliams. Then it all seized up. Banks called in loans. Romans hoarded gold and silver. Liquidity vanished. The resulting panic spread throughout the system —landowners had to sell prime real estate in Rome and Capri to cover reckless investments in Syria and Egypt. It was 2008, but with togas.
After much deliberation, Tiberius realized he’d gone too far. He’d wanted to teach the conspirators a lesson but had instead imperiled the entire Roman financial system. His solution? He bailed out the banks by injecting 100 million sesterces into the credit markets, taking land worth double the loan amount as collateral.
“Tiberius became the ‘lender of last resort’—the ancient world’s central banker,” McWilliams writes. “He wrote the playbook for Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve during the 2008 crash, by introducing quantitative easing, Roman-style.”
The most chilling part of McWilliams’ history deals with money as a weapon of war — and the two twentieth-century dictators who understood this better than anyone.
In an interview published in the “Daily Chronicle” in April 1919, Vladimir Lenin laid out his plan to annihilate capitalism by debauching Russia’s currency. “Hundreds of thousands of rouble notes are being issued daily by our treasury with the deliberate intention of destroying the value of money,” Lenin explained. “The simplest way to exterminate the very spirit of capitalism is to flood the country with notes of a high face-value without financial guarantees of any sort.”
Lenin activated Russia’s official mint to print worthless paper, calculating that once even the simplest peasant realized a thousand-rouble note was just a scrap of paper, “the great illusion of the value and power of money, on which the capitalist state is based, will have been destroyed.”
Hitler shared Lenin’s understanding of money’s power, though his approach was more surgical. In May 1942, he hatched an astonishing scheme: print perfect counterfeit British pounds and airdrop them over Britain to trigger hyperinflation and destroy the enemy’s economy from within.
“Hitler and Lenin may have been on opposite sides ideologically but they both understood the phenomenal power of money,” McWilliams writes. “Undermine money and you undermine the fabric of society.”
To pull off the counterfeiting operation, the Nazis sent a telegram to concentration camps calling for printers, engravers, artists, colorists, typesetters, paper experts, former bank officials, mathematicians, and code breakers. “A most desperate cohort of traumatized, emaciated men limped into Sachsenhausen from camps all over the Third Reich,” writes McWilliams. “These 142 souls were tasked with breaking the Bank of England.”
Among them was Salomon “Sally” Smolianoff, a portrait painter turned nightclub operator turned master forger. An SS officer named Bernhard Krueger, who had previously arrested Smolianoff in a criminal crackdown in Berlin, now needed him to forge sterling.
“Krueger, the Nazi, knew he needed Smolianoff, the Jew,” McWilliams writes. In a bizarre quirk of fate that saved his life, Smolianoff found himself leading the operation in blocks 18 and 19, shut off from the rest of Sachsenhausen.
The concentration camp forgers succeeded spectacularly. They “printed £132,610,945 of fake sterling notes, equal to about £7.5 billion or $10 billion in today’s money,” McWilliams writes.
The plan was to drop these notes over Britain using squadrons of German bombers available in 1942. But by the time the forged notes were ready in 1943, the war situation had changed. Germany was losing, the Luftwaffe’s resources were stretched thin in Russia, and the mass airdrop never happened.
Instead, the SS used the counterfeits to buy war materials on the black market, bribe officials, and fund escapes to Argentina. Sterling was the global reserve currency, which meant the fake notes could be laundered anywhere. The forgeries were so perfect that when the Bank of England discovered Nazis were using suspiciously large amounts of pounds — including paying Mussolini’s ransom in counterfeit notes —they retired all its old five-pound notes and introduced an entirely new batch.
Looking at various moments in history, McWilliams reveals an unsettling through-line: humans keep making the same mistakes with money because money’s fundamental nature hasn’t changed. It’s still about trust, still about pricing time and risk, still capable of building empires or destroying them. Lenin and Hitler understood what Tiberius knew two millennia earlier.
“Money can be more powerful than religion, ideology, or armies,” McWilliams writes. “Mess with money and you mess with far more than the price system, inflation, and economics — you mess with people’s heads.”
English (US)