Provider of online multi-asset trading services, currency data and analytics OANDA has written a book on currency, publishing “Cowries to Crypto: The History of Money, Currency and Wealth”.

Cowries to Crypto seeks to take its readers on a playful romp through world history, providing an entertaining account of the creation of money, from the earliest forms of barter to the introduction of coins, paper notes and digital currencies. Written by award-winning financial journalist, Jame DiBiasio, and beautifully narrated through a series of witty illustrations drawn by renowned satirical cartoonist, Harry Harrison, “Cowries to Crypto” tells the tale of how money came to be.

The book gives answers to a raft of questions, including:

• Mesopotamia v Lehman Brothers – what’s the worst financial crisis in history?
• What can the Ancient Greeks teach us about budgeting?
• Will the yuan overtake the dollar’s dominance?

The book begins with our ancestors bartering salt for spears, before transporting us to the caves counting was invented in, exploring why the Pharaohs never cottoned on to exchanging gold and how the Chinese invented coins, before the Ancient Greeks astonished the world by what they did with them.

It examines why, from The Age of Discovery onwards, world power would increasingly be based on credit, how the Dutch invented the stock market and became the first capitalist society, celebrates the birth of the Bank of England, dabbles in the world’s greatest financial crises, charts the rise to dominance of the dollar and explores how now, in the age of cryptocurrency, the value of different currencies has come to be based on mathematics and open-source code rather than faith in governments.

OANDA notes that, as COVID-19 accelerates us towards a cashless society and FinTech transforms banking, this book examines what the evolution of money can teach us about its future. According to the broker, the book offers a revealing insight into how money shapes society and how financial innovations have triggered some of the biggest events in history, from the Roman Empire’s accession to the discovery of the New World.