Winner of the Louis Gottsehalk Prize, American Society for Eignteenth-Century Studies, A Financial Times Best History Book of the Year, A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Rebecca L. Spang, who revolutionized our understanding of the restaurant, has written a new history of money. It uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation, the assignats-a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as "circulating land"-to demonstrate that money is as much a social and political mediator as it is an economic instrument. Following the assignats from creation to abandonment, Spang shows them to he subject to the same slippages between policies and practice, intentions and outcomes, as other human inventions. Book jacket.