Waging War with Gold 6+1

At his other place Dan was good enough to publish a 6+1 treatment of Waging War with Gold…

What’s the name of the book, and where can we find it?

Charles A. Dainoff, Robert M. Farley, and Geoffrey F. Williams. 2025. Waging War with Gold: National Security and the Finance Domain Across the Ages, Lynne Rienner Publishers.

What’s the argument?

Security analysts conceptualize “domains” as distinct arenas of competition. They originally thought in terms of three major domains: “land,” “air,” and “maritime.” Now they usually add two more: “space” and “cyber.” We add a sixth domain: “finance.”

Finance has been critical to war since the invention of currency. Its importance has evolved over time in novel and nuanced ways. We cannot understand state power in the modern international system without centering the financial “domain.” The book therefore explores finance by using the same analytics and tools that national-security professionals use for the five other major domains. We discuss finance’s history, its “commons,” and key “revolutions in financial affairs” such as the development of coinage, the development of public banks and tradable debt, the creation and maintenance of the classic gold standard, and the digitization of financial flows in the 21st century.

For a variety of other material associated with the book see here. For anyone contemplating using the book in their course or just examining its argument, I and my co-authors would be delighted to join a class remotely to discuss! Let us know at the address on the left sidebar.