Understanding Money: the History of Finance, Speculation and the Stock Market (FutureLearn)

On this course, you will learn how literary, cultural, visual and historical studies have offered new ways of understanding money and investment. You will look at popular representations of finance in visual culture and literature and explore the social meaning of credit, debt and the role of the market. You will also investigate financial crises in history and analyse how the media presents this information to the public.

What topics will you cover?

• An introduction to the disciplinary debates regarding the function and histories of money.
• An exploration of money’s representations in art, literature and popular culture.
• An introduction to stocks, shares, investment and the national debt.
• An exploration of how investment cultures have changed and the role that technology and financial advice have played in them.
• An analysis of the causes and forms of financial crisis.
• An exploration of four case studies - the South Sea Bubble, the Railway Mania, the Wall Street Crash and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

What will you achieve?
By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

• Explain the ways in which critical, cultural and literary history and theory contributes to our understanding of three central economic concepts – money, credit, markets.
• Evaluate the differences between a number of central critical traditions and theoretical approaches (eg the history of money as credit versus the history of money as a commodity).
• Describe the origins and the purpose of the contemporary financial market and the ways in which it functions.
• Identify and discuss the ways in which a range of literary and visual texts offer us a critical insight into these histories and give them a social and political relevance.
• Critically reflect on the ways in which the visual appearance of money signals it as a source of authority and locates it within a specific place and time.
• Evaluate the implications of an historical approach to money that reads it as process of dematerialisation (from barter to gold to paper).
• Develop an understanding of the formation of money in contemporary society and why this is a history of credit and how it has been made sense of through a recurring visual and linguistic imagery (eg the bubble and the balloon).
• Understand the history and function of the stock exchange and the way in which it has moved from a physical location to a set of highly complex mathematical operations.
• Reflect upon your own relationship and access to the idea of the financial market and your knowledge of it.
• Examine how the financial crisis was given a narrative in the mainstream press and what this suggested for the need to change the conditions in which it had occurred.