Undoing the impersonal power characteristic of bourgeois money thus entails undoing the economic dispossession of the labouring poor, which forms the basis of their ‘possession’ by capital.

Colonialism, war, slavery and dispossession underline the omnipresence of ‘blood and dirt’ in the development and reproduction of capitalist impersonal power as expressed in world money. The crucial role of the Bank of England in this new monetary system is shown to have pivoted on its capacities to finance Britain’s inter-colonial wars. Departing from the development of coinage in ancient Greece, the article proceeds to identify the 1690s in Britain as the decisive moment in the emergence of a new and distinctively capitalist form of money, institutionally based upon the Bank of England, in which state debt was thoroughly integrated with private financial markets. The social dynamism of this logic involves the spatial-territorial extension of the domain of modern value relations, embodied in fully-capitalist money. In opposition to the dual-logics position, the article argues for the distinctiveness of capitalist money in terms of a complex butunitarysocio-economic logic. In this groundbreaking study David McNally reveals the true story of money’s origins and development as one of violence and human bondage. In this groundbreaking study David McNally reveals the true story of moneys origins and development as one of violence and human bondage. Insisting on the status of money as a creature of both the market and the state, this article challenges dualistic understandings of capitalist imperialism as entailing two fundamentally distinct logics, one capitalist, the other territorial.

Blood and Money by David McNally