ABSTRACT
From a historical perspective, modern societies are still feeling their way towards a satisfactory social organisation of the highly integrated productive system which economic development has so recently produced. With few exceptions it was-even in most developed countries-only a few generations ago that the world consisted predominantly of small farmers producing largely for their own consumption without more than a marginal involvement in commerce. In Britain, where industrialisation first appeared, it is only necessary to go back to my grandmother’s grandmother to reach someone born before the first spate of railway building, before the first fruits of the Industrial Revolution. In Japan it has been estimated that as recently as the 1860s only some 5 per cent of the population were engaged in any kind of wage employment (Dore 1973). The monetary economy, rather than being a permanent feature of human society, has only become the dominant force in the lives of most of the world’s population during the last half century. Although money has a long history, it played only a marginal role in the lives of self-sufficient peasant producers. Even the role which money did have in pre-industrial societies was often tightly constrained-with prices and wages fixed by tradition or even law, and clear prohibitions on usury.
