In case you haven’t been paying attention—or maybe you don’t live in the United States—you should know that this year marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. If you prefer funny words, you can call it America’s semiquincentennial. Anyway, what this means for us is that there are a shocking number of books about the American Revolution, the early United States, and related subjects coming out this year. You’re going to hear some of them on this show, starting with today’s episode. One of the fascinating things that these books will show us is just how many ways you can approach history. So first up, in this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Andrew Edwards to talk about his new book, Money and the Making of the American Revolution. Andrew is a lecturer at the University of St. Andrew in Scotland, and a historian of capitalism, money, and early America. In Money and the Making of the American Revolution he takes a deep dive into the role of money—and the meaning of money—as one of the key causes of the American Revolution. Andrew tells the story of money in the American colonies and in Great Britain to explain that it was a fight over money and who got to define it, rather than taxes, that kicked off the colonists’ rebellion. If that sounds dry and maybe a little confusing to you, I’m happy to report that Andrew does a remarkable job of telling this history in a way that is interesting even to those of us who don’t love making sense of obscure fiscal policies. In our conversation, we talked about just how he did that and why he wrote an avid defense of narrative history in the book’s introduction. But first, he tells us about the very winding road he took to becoming a historian in the first place.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Andrew David Edwards, Money and the Making of the American Revolution
- Zotero
- Eelco Runia, “Presence,” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006), 1-29
- Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings
- Martha Sandweiss, The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West and Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Isabela Morales also mentioned Martha Sandweiss’ history writing course in her episode of Drafting the Past)
- Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History
- R. F. Kuang, Katabasis
Note that bookshop.org links are affiliate links that generate a small commission to support the show if you purchase books using these links.
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Welcome back to drafting the past. This is a podcast about the craft of history, and I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. In case you haven't been paying attention, or maybe you just don't live in the United States, you should know that this year marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. If you prefer funny words, you can call it America's semiquincentennial. That's semiquincentennial. Anyway, what this means for us is that there are a shocking number of books about the American Revolution, the early United States, and related subjects coming out this year. You're going to hear some of them on the show, starting with today's episode. One of the fascinating things that these books are going to show us is just how many ways you can approach writing history. So first up in this episode, I'm thrilled to be joined by Dr Andrew Edwards to talk about his new book, Money and the Making of the American Revolution.
Andrew Edwards 0:57
What a pleasure it is to be here, Kate.
Kate Carpenter 0:59
Andrew is a lecturer at the University of St Andrew in Scotland, and a historian of capitalism, money and early America. In Money and the Making of the American Revolution, he takes a deep dive into the role of money and the meaning of money as one of the key causes of the revolution. Andrew tells the story of money in the American colonies and in Great Britain to explain that it was a fight over money and who got to define it rather than taxes that kicked off the colonists' rebellion. If that sounds dry and maybe a little confusing to you, I am happy to report that Andrew does a remarkable job of telling this story in a way that's interesting even to those of us who don't love making sense of obscure fiscal policies. In our conversation, we talked about just how he did that and why he wrote an avid defense of narrative history in the book's introduction. But first he's going to tell us about the very winding road he took to becoming a historian in the first place. Here's my conversation with Andrew Edwards.
Andrew Edwards 2:00
I decided I wanted to be a writer after the first time I dropped out of college. Because I went to college, you know, like most people do when you're 18, I guess, to study physics and sculpture at UCLA, which was a weird lifestyle decision. And I went down there. And I'm from, like, the middle of nowhere in Northern California, and I met Europeans for the first time. Which is weird, considering I live in Europe. I just couldn't believe they existed. I, like, they truly blew my mind. I lived with them in this co-op--lived with them. That's a bizarre way to put it, too. And after my first year was over, and I was there on scholarship, and after my first year was over, I was just like, oh, I don't need to go back to school right now. I think I need to wander off to Europe. It's a long story, sorry. But I became a baker. That was the point. To pay for the trip to Europe, and then I went to Europe, and I was in Bremen in Germany, and I met a friend of mine who had just gotten back from being a war correspondent in Kosovo, and we had this late night chat where we listened to U2 and talked about being writers. And I was just like, that's it. I want to be a writer. That was the that was, it was like a conversion experience during Oktoberfest in Bremen. So I came back, and I threw away physics and and sculpture for that matter, and I started studying journalism. Did that for a couple years at my local university, and then got a job at a newspaper, and that one summer like as an intern, and this was the good old days, so they just offered me a full time job immediately after. So I was like, What's school good for? And I just left it aside and became a journalist. So I was a journalist in Northern California for a year, which is extremely fun, and then I decided I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. In yet another fun zag, quit my job, wandered off to Asia, lived in Asia, wrote for a bunch of magazines and newspapers there, among other things, for about a year, and then I came, I decided, while I was in Asia that I wanted to become a financial reporter. This was just after China had joined the World Trade Organization. And in China. You mean, it was just the craziest stuff was happening, like they would just blow up a whole city and then rebuild it, and then blow it up again and then rebuild it. And I, as a reporter, I got to know all sorts of crazy people. I just got, you know, you were immediately juiced with people who were mayors of cities of 6 million people, or, you know, I had dinner with the Kuwait Ambassador once. I was like, what is, you know, I was just having a very strange life. And I was like, why is this happening? They're like, well, there's all this money just flowing in China. And I became really, really interested in that. I became interested in, like, how these sort of global structures of finance were moving. And everyone told me that if you were interested in that, you just had to move to New York, which seemed pretty intuitive. So I moved to New York after Asia without a college degree and decided to become a financial reporter, which is a total, obviously insane thing to do. As you may know, college degrees are like high school diplomas. Obviously, everyone knows this, but did I know this at the time? Maybe sort of. So I just applied to every publication in the tri state area, probably? Did not get a job immediately, you'll be shocked to find, and ended up working as a baker again. So it was this full circle thing, or get a bakery on the Upper East Side in New York for a year, and then I had a series of other bizarre jobs. And then one day, I got a call from the Wall Street Journal, and they said, Do you want to come in for an interview? I was like, yes, please save me from this bizarre New York underworld that I'd found myself in. And I came in, and the managing editor, the hiring editor at the time, started speaking to me in Chinese, and it was in that moment that I realized I put on my resume that I could speak Chinese, which was kind of funny, but luckily, I remembered enough Chinese to understand what she'd asked me, which is, do you speak Chinese? And I said, Yes, I speak Chinese in Chinese. And then she was like, Yes! And then we were like, just best buddies. Yeah, so she got me a job there, working at the Dow Jones news wire, which is like the real time business to business side of the Wall Street Journal. Wow, that was it, you know, I was like, This is it. I'm gonna be, I'm gonna work myself up from the newsroom. And I did, more or less, like, I just worked there for, I guess, like, four and a half, five years. It was, it was just like an insane trial by fire in writing, because you would write 13 stories a day, which I guess is not weird now, in like, the online universe, but coming from a newspaper like, it felt like, like, what are they trying to do to me? But it was super fun, and it was just a wild education. And then I was there in the 2008 financial crisis, and that was like, you know, going to war, like being a war correspondent, really, it was such an insane experience that really, like, blew my mind. It like, oh, the veils were torn back because I worked on complex financial instruments, which is kind of, I don't know, I was just sort of like I was interested in them, and, you know, no, and it was like a thing that I could do that other people couldn't do. I liked writing intelligibly about bizarre things like finance, which has obviously remained true so like, but then that was the heart of the crisis, so it was just like suddenly that these things that nobody knew anything out about, everybody wanted to know about. That was amazing. But also, I found out that all of our interlocutors at the banks had been lying to us about what their profit centers were, and it turned out that all these very complex financial instruments were at the center of the crisis, right? And they but they were also the way that these billions of dollars of profits had been being made in ways that they'd obscured through various accounting systems before that. So once that crisis was over, I was just like, I became really, really fascinated with where that crisis had come from. I guess I kind of like, you know, I had this sort of auto didactic, kind of financial economics education, sort of, but one thing I learned from that crisis was that economics itself as a discipline, was not really very insightful about when big transformations were going to happen. And I became really interested in figuring out, I don't know, the history of that, and so I started taking night classes at Columbia and going up there every single day. And then I eventually, I just became way more interested in that than I was in my actual job. So I quit my job as a reporter, to the great horror of my mother and father, who were like, thank God. Finally, he has health insurance. And and just became an undergraduate at Columbia at the School of General Studies, which was like, absolutely magical and transformative, and led me to applying to Princeton and going there. So the real trick as I came to academia was like, I think, like, was trying to figure out how to, like, write about money and finance in a way that wasn't, like, sort of exclusive to, I don't know, the discourse of money, or sort of like internal to the system of economics and money, like a way that was for people, so to speak, which is, really, I don't know if it's trickier in the past than it is in the present, but, like, I don't know that's like the problem of writing that I happened upon at Columbia, and then in my very, very late introduction to academia, and then have been sort of worried about it ever since.
Kate Carpenter 9:41
Okay, so I want to get back to some of that, but first, I want to ask all of my nosy questions about your writing. So when and where do you work?
Andrew Edwards 9:50
I work right here. So this is my office. I have an office in St Andrews, Scotland, which is a tiny town where they invented golf that also has a university on a cliff overlooking the North Sea. And when I got this job, the thing I was most excited about was having an office to myself. And I got to pick three little offices, and one of them has a sea view. So I picked that office because I'm not insane, and it is right behind me as we're talking. And I wrote 85% of the book in this office, because I could lock the door and the way I work is in graduate school, I did not keep normal banker's hours. I worked all times of nights and day, and I really, really, it was not great for my mental health or my physical health, or my relational health, or anything whatsoever. So I resolved, after I had kids in the UK and we came over here, that I would just work nine to five. So that's how I do it. I just get up in the morning every day that I'm not teaching, or like in the school year particularly, so like in the big breaks, and I just come in and sit down and go to work, and then I leave like, you know, around the time that I'd pick up my kids, and that, to me, has been the most productive writing experience of my entire life.
Kate Carpenter 11:11
Are there particular times that you protect for writing versus other university work?
Andrew Edwards 11:15
I have a real hard time writing during the semester, and I hope to get better at that as time goes on. But for me, like teaching is, like kind of mentally and kind of emotionally exhausting in a way that makes it difficult for me to schedule writing that's going to work, let me put it that way. So I do a lot of writing during the school year, but I can't, I can't block it out the way I see people do and hear about people doing. For me, the only time I can do that is when, when we're when we have big breaks, like when, basically when the undergraduates are gone, and I'm not worried about their lives and feelings, and I don't know, mental development or whatever. And it's not their fault. It's not like they're taking all my time. It's just they're taking, like, my brain space in a weird way. You know what I mean? I feel like you need like, emotional time to write, like the space to kind of like, so your like, subconscious and conscious can kind of work together.
Kate Carpenter 12:11
How do you like to organize yourself?
Andrew Edwards 12:13
Sequentially? I I'm like, I'm a big fan of narrative history, because my brain works, in terms of, like, I want to construct a story and like, maybe it goes back to being a journalist or something like that, like I want to, I want to do one thing at a time, and I want to work through it in order, if I can, which, of course, means, like, a bunch of weird. It means this weird sort of interplay between having done a bunch of research beforehand, but then also, like running into problems and researching as you go, or whatever. But I found that to be like the most, I think, is I don't know. It's only way that I can, I can seem to do things I don't really know.
Kate Carpenter 12:52
What are your systems for keeping track of your sources?
Andrew Edwards 12:56
I use Zotero. I've used Zotero since I was an undergrad at Columbia. So I have every single book I've ever read, every single article I've ever read, every note I've ever taken, for the most part, for now 13 years, so which has just become like this incredible, crazy archive all on its own. And when I'm in the archives, I take notes in there as well. So it's all kind of in one place. It's all in one place. And then I've like, tried like, a million provisional systems for like, you know, putting them into folders, or doing this, that and the other but those seem to be project by project. Like, for me, it's about kind of having everything, like, like, kind of classified and in one spot. But not necessarily. I have friends who, like, you know, make a Word document of every single step. Every single source that they're going to use, or whatever, and I've never had any success with that ever, because, like, for me, it's kind of like when you're working through a story sequentially the moment you're at and the story is going to suggest that you need a source, or something like that, that I could never come up with if I was just prepping.
Kate Carpenter 14:01
Where in your research process do you like to start writing?
Andrew Edwards 14:03
As early as possible? Because for me, like, writing is thinking. So if I'm not writing about it, I'm not thinking about it. So I find that, like when I'm in an archive, so, like, I use a lot of, like, numerical sources, but I found that I so I spent like, you know, a year when I was in grad school, or months and months anyway, like just going around, like little archives, reading account books. Which are these, you know, really bizarre. And they're, they're kind of like, not rich source material, until you kind of figure them out. And but once you do figure them out, you're like, oh, wow, you can learn an entire biography of a human you know, in, like, 100 pages of every single you know, financial transaction they had over the course of their lives. Because the only thing that, the only reason those things were preserved is because when they died, you know, all these things were added up. It went into probate. So you get, like, a picture of their entire life. And I found that the best notes I took in those archives were when as I was reading, I wrote a little biography based on what I'd read. Because if I just went back and all I saw was, like a list of debts and credits, like it was just fully unintelligible. So I find, like, the more I can kind of narrate to myself, like what I'm reading even as I'm, like, just encountering it in the archive, like the more useful it becomes subsequently. But that, I don't know, but that's not the same as, of course, like trying to write, like the pieces per se, but it's like the start of the process.
Kate Carpenter 15:35
How do you know you're ready to start drafting?
Andrew Edwards 15:38
I don't know. I really, yeah. I mean, last minute panic is the probably, like the most accurate. And I just keep going. I don't, I wish I had a better answer. I really admire people who are like and now I have done enough. For me, it's more like I feel like the story begins to emerge, like it starts feeling as if, like connections start coming together in a way that feels useful and intelligible, and is also making a historiographical point. And then I get excited about it, and then I start writing it, and then I realize that it's totally inadequate and that more work needs to be done. And that's like an iterative process.
Kate Carpenter 16:18
Is there a point where you see yourself as revising, or is that all sort of part of that process?
Andrew Edwards 16:23
I constantly revise, like, literally anything I've ever written, I've written 15 times. It is mostly a process of, like me being angry with it until I'm not angry with it anymore. But I don't know if that counts, or if that's just what writing is. I don't know. I never, very rarely, will I have written a whole thing, and then I'll be like, and now I will go back and like, reconfigure it. That only tends to happen to me, like, in an institutional setting, in the sense that, like, you know, when you do an article, if you get like, revise and resubmit, then I am, like, very actively revising. But leading up to submitting it, I was actively revising too, so I'm not but those are the times where I'd be like, that's all I'm doing, is revising, is once it's actually someone's looked at it, you know, a few people have said nice things or yelled at me, and then I feel like I'm revising when I'm interacting with those other people. I don't know, but there's a real difference, like, the difference between, like, you know, the internal fight to not hate what you've written, and the sort of desire to communicate it once you get like that sort of feedback and stuff like that. So building those feedback loops is really pretty crucial, actually.
Kate Carpenter 17:30
So I'm really curious about how you feel like the multiple lives you lived before becoming a historian affect the way that you write. Did all those experiences as a journalist and elsewhere shape how you approach writing?
Andrew Edwards 17:44
Yeah. I mean, the short answer is yes. The question, I guess, is how, and I don't know, I think the experience of being a journalist was really crucial for me, because it taught me a certain kind of lack of attachment to what I'm writing, which is really helpful for me, in the sense that I can write really quickly. I write really quickly, like, 50,000 times, but I write really quickly, and I have, like, an imagined person in my head, I think also from being a journalist, like I want to talk to someone who is the--actually the person who I always want to read my stuff is my little brother, because he's a he's like, he's a really, really, really great guy. He's an air traffic controller, but he dropped out of college, so he's not like an academic person, but he's a really, really smart person. And so I think, like, that's kind of who I'm trying to get at, so to speak. But, and I think that journalism teaches you that too, in the sense that like your your default setting is always like and I can't get away from this. I actually, actually, I find it really kind of disturbing sometimes that I when I'm writing for an expert audience, like so I write in the history of money, and there's a bunch of like little, it's a weird, little niche world, but when I'm writing for them, I find myself much more uncomfortable than when I'm trying to write for, I don't know, like my little brother or you, or like somebody who doesn't care about money at all. Like to me, that's like the natural audience, as opposed to, like, my glorious peers.
Kate Carpenter 19:13
So I'm going to read a line from your acknowledgements, the first line from your acknowledgements, because it made me laugh, and I feel like a lot of readers will relate to it. But you said, "this book has survived two deaths, two births, two countries, three nations, a couple of mental breakdowns, a global pandemic, and the academic job market." What kept you working on the book?
Andrew Edwards 19:33
Orneriness. I think on some level. There's a bunch of weird things to it. Like, on the one hand, I felt like I needed to write a book like, you know, like there's a professional obligation, which is not to be discounted. The more important thing for me personally was that I felt an obligation to tell this story in a way that was at least trying to reach an audience who would understand it and who would therefore understand the world, like, themselves, their country, like, a little bit better, and that sort of, it feels kind of high flown, but it really was, like, a big part of the motivation. But the main, and the main thing was, like, all those things happened, but I just, I don't know. It felt like, I don't know. For long periods of time. I would say that, you know, the reason I say that in there. And I mean, it's, well, a, it's 100% true. But B, there were long periods of time in my academic career where I was not working on this book at all. So the story was, is, you know, maybe the impression I'm giving is that I just kept on grinding through pandemics and births and stuff like that. But the real, the real truth of it is, that all those events like taught me that I had to take time away from the story in order to be able to come back and tell it, taking time to be with my son when he was born, and my daughter when she was born, and when my father died during the pandemic, like these things, like taking care of myself, I think actually, weirdly, like, I think it led to a richer book. It definitely led to me being happier as a writer and more satisfied as a writer, in a way that when I was first in grad school I didn't understand, like when I was first in grad school, like my--well, first in grad school, I'm mean the five and a half years of grad school, the entire time, I thought that the whole method was to just grind it out and not tell anybody you were having a hard time. The sort of the the drama that I mentioned in that line, what it like, really taught me was that that that was not true, and that there was diminishing returns to that. And beyond diminishing returns that you're you're kind of at the risk of self destruction if you don't take your heart and your body and your relationships all into account while you're trying to do this bizarre, I don't know, like, you know, esoteric mental labor, shall we say? So, yeah, it was a huge and that was a huge learning process. Is a huge learning process. I try to with my own graduate students and, like, just students in general, in my university, I try to, I try to tell them that. But on the one hand, you know, it's weird, because you're also like, you know that you should still work, but, and then I'm like, am I part of the problem? I don't know. But yeah, that, I don't know, that was, that learning process was like, that was the most meaningful thing that's happened to me. I mean, other than, yeah, obviously the births and the relationships and all those things, but going through that and learning how to be an academic, while accepting life's slings and arrows and, you know, misfortune and fortune and all these different things, was like, that was like, the, I don't know that was the thing I learned, really. I mean, I also learned about money in the revolution. But that was the deepest thing, I think.
Kate Carpenter 22:55
To take a closer look at the book that emerged out of Andrew's long work, let's dive into an excerpt. I've asked Andrew to read to us from chapter four, which is titled The Stamp Act: Crisis in London and America, 1765 to 1766. These paragraphs come from a section of the chapter which is subtitled "Pennsylvanian Lawyer John Dickinson's Career Crashes Alongside the Post War Economy." Here's Dr Andrew Edwards reading from Money and the Making of the American Revolution.
Andrew Edwards 23:27
"That July found [John Dickinson] riding from courthouse to courthouse, county seat to county seat, choked by the dust from drying fields of barley, oats, and flax. No rain had fallen since May, except, he wrote his mother “a little Sprinkling when I was in Bethlehem.” His horse was starving; the grass was dried to stubble. His cases were depressing. Debts contracted during the Seven Years’ War were coming due, and many were in default because debtors couldn’t find enough in coin or bills of credit to pay them. The result was a “terrible crush.” Everyone felt it. Merchants in Philadelphia and London hired lawyers like Dickinson to pursue their creditors in county courts. If their creditors couldn’t pay, their assets would be auctioned to the highest bidder. Big merchants pressed country stores, who pressed farmers with few cash reserves. The colony’s loan office had been invented to prevent just such an eventuality. But the Currency Act prevented the loan office from operating, just as Penn’s personal tax revolt prevented the colony from creating new bills of credit. The result was a wave of bankruptcies and sheriff’s auctions, a boon to a lawyer like Dickinson, but a worrying one. As a legislator, he had thought of parliamentary mismanagement as a distant possibility. Now his fears were becoming reality. And on top of those concerns came the Stamp Act.”
Kate Carpenter 24:45
What goes into writing this passage?
Andrew Edwards 24:47
Well, the first part was like finding the personal letter where he talks about all the, like, just-- in the archives, there's this moment, you know, which is a really crucial moment in his life. So thinking about his biography, John Dickinson's biography was really important too. He's like, you know, he's between jobs. He's been kicked out of the Pennsylvania legislature. He's, you know, he's a very successful lawyer. He's a very ambitious guy, but he seems angry. He writes his mother all the time. So if you go into his archives, that's from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, I'm pretty sure. There's all these letters to his mother. And just like the evocation of the landscape, really, really, really, really got me. The idea that his horse was hungry, that the grass was dry, and that this was this moment. And like, you know, in general, there's, like, there's a lot of discourse around the summer of 1765, about this drought that's like sweeping the east coast of Anglophone North America, and like, just to see that sort of evoked, and to think through it like, you know, as an event, like both, like a weather event, an event in his life, and an event in what's going to be like this, this, this contest between, you know, the colonies and Great Britain, and kind of having, like, the the thinking through that sort of weather event as a metaphor, was very, I don't know, it seemed, it seemed powerful to me. And it seemed, I mean, but the main thing was like, well, not the main thing. There's no main thing per se. But it struck me as, oh, so, when I'm writing, you know, I'm writing about, like, money and finance and financial institutions and all this stuff. But one thing that becomes really clear, if you're a historian of this stuff, I think, is that, you know, money is deeply emotionally evocative. You know, if you don't have money, it hurts you like, it's painful, it's physical. It, you know, it feels as if it shouldn't be, but it in fact is, right? And even if you have one, even if you're doing really, really well, if you see everyone around you, you see their lives falling apart, and you, they're falling apart because of, you know, an institutional failure, which you you know, you kind of understand a little but you don't quite understand a little bit, like maybe, you know, you know, they just messed up, or they went too far, or whatever. But I think it has a real emotional effect. And I felt the emotional effect in his writing, and what I wanted to do, when you find like a letter like that, it's just like such a it's such a gift to the historian, because it's like a, it's a chance to make the connections between like emotions and circumstances and institutions. And and hopefully make them real for the reader a little bit. And, you know, and so I like, literally, I try to do that every turn, like, at every turn, like I want you to I want you to feel the way these institutions work in a way, like I want you to know, because you have to know. But more than that, I want you to, like, I want you to understand that this like, that, the way you know, money is organized, which sounds so esoteric, like, in fact, just has all sorts of, like, wild, personal repercussions. And then those personal repercussions become political. And to do all of that without, like, breaking into an analytical register, if you know what I mean, like, Yeah, let's all discuss how Marx thinks there's a relationship between, you know, the alienating forces of political economy. Not that I think that that's not useful. But like, you know, I want to ground the reader and so that they can kind of empathize with it, I think, in a sense. But mostly it all comes back to that, like that moment where you're sitting in the archive and you feel that overwhelmingly in this, you know, one man's, you know, letter to his mother, like how all these things flow through that letter and then in and out. There's this historical theorist named Eelko Runia. His big theory is that, like, we shouldn't be understanding history through metaphor, like as Hayden White would have taught us in Metahistory. And in fact, we should be using metonymy, which is about the presence of these objects and where they carry through, it's very historian of science, material and culture kind of thinking. But his point is that, like what we feel when we read history is the presence of history in the present. Yeah, that's what I was trying to, I feel like weather is like one of these ways that you evoke both like continuity and like discontinuity.
Kate Carpenter 29:09
It was interesting to me that this is a book about financial systems, basically, which is not inherently interesting to a lot of people. You've had a lot of experience in your career of making financial systems legible to regular people. And you do, obviously, a great job here. Were there other strategies you were sort of trying to keep in mind, as you wrote?
Andrew Edwards 29:29
Yeah, the strategies I was trying-- I had like, two main, main strategies. And I yeah, I already kind of mentioned one, which is that I want it to be, like, always, like physical, like I want you to feel the way that these institutions make you feel. But that's kind of like the second strategy, in a strange way. The first strategy is that I wanted you to see that--and if the book is successful, this is what it does--is that financial institutions and things like money and credit and all these things like, you know, don't exist. Outside of human ideas or human activity, like they were just made up by by people and by collective action, of course, so politically. But like, more than that, they're, they're the result of, you know, specific ideas and specific confluences. And so, like, always being mindful of the the physicality of these individuals and like their ideas themselves as objects in some weird way, right? Not thinking of ideas as something that are, that exist on the page that we can just sort of like work through intellectually in terms of their, you know, intelligibility or coherence or whatever, that we can do that, but more that, like the the I--well, the idea, or rather, the work of ideas, right? The work of like, working through these concepts, you know, figuring out how to narrate them, figuring out how to defend them, figuring out how to, like, put them into political action, like all that sort of stuff. And then on the flip side of that, showing how, you know, those those ideas, which are then turned into these laws, turned into institutions, can reshape, almost like gut reactions in some weird way. Or not even in a weird way, rather like in a, like a just like, totally direct way, in a way that can make people create, like, you know, new countries. But not to put too, too fine a point on it, but like, you know, we'll be willing to rise up together, be willing to, like, trust each other in the situation where they're, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're risking treason, or they're just committing treason, straight out, putting you in a life or death situation as a result of somebody in some room, in some place, having thought a certain set of ideas and then putting them into powerful action. To me, like, that's the struggle. Because I can, like you can, kind of, I don't know, because, as a journalist, anyway, you one of the things you learn, if you like, hang out with the powerful and the rich, is that that's, in fact, what's happening. You know, it's not, it's not that they're in a conspiracy against the public, but what power means is that you get to reshape other people's actual lives. That's the actual story of it. Putting that into history, to me, it seems like, I don't know, to be a service, so to speak. I don't know. I mean, that struck me as like necessary in a way that maybe it doesn't…it just really, really seemed to me to be a requirement. So why it was a requirement? I'm now questioning myself. I don't know. But because you know you need to feel, you need to feel it, to understand it. I think at the end of the day, you do.
Kate Carpenter 32:31
I really like about this book that it is a great example of a book that is a narrative history that is making a really strong argument, and that the narrative is making the argument. I think there's a, maybe a straw man, but sometimes the belief that you either write a narrative history or you write an argumentative history, and that choosing one is giving up the other. And you even, you have a great line that I'm going to read again where you say "narrative histories are implicitly arguments about the causes of historical change and the nature of that change." And you do also talk about how there are some trade offs in choosing a narrative history. How did you choose this structure? Why was it important to you to write it this way?
Andrew Edwards 33:08
I don't know. You know, the thing is, the truth of the matter was that I was like, told repeatedly that I shouldn't do it this way. So it was very, very deliberate. I don't know. I don't think, I don't think it's a straw man to say that there's two ways to write, at least monetary and financial history. I think there's other like, forms of history that are a bit squishier in terms of like, maybe that there's a broader spectrum. But in monetary and financial history, it seems to me, just like, as I read it, that you can either, like, have a running fight with everyone who's ever written about it over the past 100 years or so, 50 maybe is a minimum, in which case your audience is three people, or you can, or you might, I guess, like try to tell it as a story that reflects that fight in some strange way, or not in a strange way, like in a direct way. It's a complicated thing to kind of, to explain, because, like, the way I felt so deeply that I had to write a narrative history, that I felt the need to to defend it in the book. But I think it's because there's certain kinds of arguments which, in a sense, like, can only be told and made, rather, in narrative, because they are arguments about the transformation of institutions which don't allow you to hold, you know, to basically, like, set up a whole bunch of different constants, set up a whole bunch of different variables, and then tell a story of, like, causal interconnectivity in an explicit way, because the constants are constantly being reformed and re changed as institutions themselves get, get remade by people. And like this is, you know, like I said, like this very physical process and then affects people. And when you're in these periods of, like, really massive transformations, like revolutions, it strikes me that the reason people write narratives about revolutions is because there's really no other way to intelligibly go through the way that these transformations happen, because there's no other way of saying, you know, we began in this kind of place, and then we went through this extraordinarily dense, complicated, contingent series of processes. Like, it's not just one thing, it's this confluence of all kinds of different, you know, events, empire, all these different, you know, things all sort of going together, making these kind of things happen. So there's that. It seems to me that, like, strategically, if you don't want to limit yourself to an almost like kind of like artificial story, which presumes, makes certain assumptions about the way the institutions work. If you want to actually, like work your way into the minds of like the institutional creators and see how it happens, you almost are forced to use a narrative. Okay, so that's, that's, that's one piece of it, but maybe the more important piece is that, I think that narratives are how we understand history, and if you want your history to be understood, you have to tell a story on some level. I think that the narrative form is, we cannot, like, in fact, do history without it. And I think that histories that kind of eschew narrative, like, you know, for whatever analytical purposes, are nonetheless telling these kinds of stories. They're just telling it in a different way. They're telling it with a different--and there's nothing, there's nothing totally wrong about that. But it struck me that, like the most accessible and impactful way of telling this story was to just explicitly say, I am going to tell the story of of this massive, you know, world shattering event through what might seem like like a crazily narrow lens, but as you go through, you'll see that, in fact, it reveals the story in a completely different way. And there's no way to prove that, except for telling the story, right? There's no other way of of like making that real. If I invite, if I just told you that you can't understand the narrative of the American Revolution without understanding American money, which I do in the beginning of the book, if I just said that to you and then I didn't actually tell you the story, like, would I have done the job? Like, I don't know. I don't think so.
Kate Carpenter 37:16
Honestly, the one other thing I really want to talk to you about in terms of the text itself is your section titles within chapters. They, they're such a surprising delight in the book. They're kind of these like sort of nod to, like an old fashioned writing style. They're often, they're long and sometimes discursive and often very wry. I laughed out loud reading some of them. What inspired those? Were you just entertaining yourself?
Andrew Edwards 37:45
It was like a combination of entertaining myself and spite, which is like a lot of historical work. I'd gotten, basically what happened was like, I'd written the story version, and I got, I feel like--first of all, I want to tell you, reader two of this book, anonymous reader two, that I appreciate you. You did wonderful things. If you're listening to this podcast, I'm currently saying a prayer of thanks for your existence, but I was deeply annoyed because I hadn't written it in the way that, like, not saying anything bad about graduate students, but that, in theory, according to reader two, that a graduate student would want to read it, which is to say I hadn't just given you the whole argument, then a list of evidence, and then a conclusion, which does the same thing, and therefore it makes it difficult to skim the book. And I, well, this is, in fact, why I had to defend narrative in the beginning, which was a great gift once again. Thank you, reader two. But I just sort of like, okay, well, you know, narratives are an old, tale as old as time, obviously. That's like, how history gets told. And then I was like, literally thinking to 18th century and 19th century examples of how like people in the past, like made, I don't know their their narratives, like accessible to people who are trying to read them very quickly. The person who like immediately jumps to mind, because I just taught him a couple days ago, is Olaudah Equiano. So like in the narrative of his life, he, what he does is like, in the beginning, he just has a list of like, the events that are going to happen in the chapter, and he doesn't have subheadings. But what he has like is that, in which, you know, this happens and this happens. You like, you've seen this in, like, Dickens, right? And I was like, Well, I'm writing about the 18th century. It's like, kind of funny to do that. So originally, what I did is, I, like, wrote this thing at the beginning of every single chapter in which I said, in which this, this, this, this, this, and this happens. And then that felt like a little bit too cheeky, like, in the end, to use a British phrase, like, also, maybe not super usable. So then I broke them all out into these section headings. And so what you're seeing in those section headings is like the leftover of this, like, bizarre deep dive, you know, steampunk approach, to me trying to make the book easy for graduate students to read. But I'm glad you like them, because I had so much fun writing them, because I tried to-- they, some of them used to be longer, but they were all written in the spirit of like, if you didn't actually want to read this section, what would be like the the six words that would tell you what happened. But I'm really glad you liked it, because I think they're fun. I mean, I don't know now, now I'm a, bizarrely, a consumer of the book too, and I'm like, I read it, I'm like, Oh, that's good. That is what the section, okay, I can turn to that. It's actually super useful.
Kate Carpenter 40:35
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever received?
Andrew Edwards 40:46
There's been so many things over the years, so so many things. I think, like the two, the two, it's maybe easier to tell about like the two people who are most influential. The most influential person initially was my first editor, and I, you know, dropped out of college again to become a reporter in small town California. It was this guy named Keith Easthouse, and he, he was just, he was just an incredible dude. He, his whole demeanor was like, we are in the job of writing like, you know, newspaper copy in order to A, like, have the most fun you possibly can, and B, just mess everything up. You know what I mean? Like, take it to the institutions, take it to the corporations, take it to the government. And we just had a ball. But like, the main thing like that, he, he taught me, was the bravery like, to have the bravery to, like, not accept the assumptions of your most powerful sources, or, you know, in historical terms, like not to accept the assumptions of the most powerful historiography, to try and step out and tell stories that are going to make an impact. And he, you know, honestly, he just demonstrated that every single day. He got fired very soon after I left, because he made too many people angry, and I hope he's doing extremely well today. I don't really know. He was an amazing guy, and he taught me so much. And the other one was actually, when I was in graduate school, was Marni Sandweiss' course on history writing, which was a mind boggling experience, because it was the first time, first of all, that I kind of, like, tried, I like tried to write history as if it were a novel, or something like that. There was, I guess, I didn't know, coming into grad school that we weren't writing stories. I don't know. I thought we were kind of, that was kind of the business we were in, and encountering the idea that, actually, it might be, like a little bit weird to write narrative history, or might be, like a little bit off base. And then learning, you know, meeting all these different writers who had made a career out of doing that, and who thought of themselves as iconoclasts was a real, I guess they were just like Keith Easthouse, sort of coming back, like Marni, you know, very, very, very tough, very, very smart, just like in, sort of encountering these people and like, kind of like seeing like what it took to write a narrative. The person I remember, like most explicitly, is Karl Jacoby, who wrote Shadows at Dawn, just an incredible history of an Indian massacre in, I think was in Arizona today. And he told us about, he told us this stuff, which I just, like at the time, just did not believe, but I now fully, like understand in my bones, which is that writing a narrative history, or like trying to tell a story, is like it has to be internally satisfying in some weird way, like it can't be even though it maybe it's for the reader, like it can't be externally driven because there's, there aren't enough rewards along the way, unless you're finding it in the writing itself, I think, is what he was saying. There wasn't a piece of advice, exactly, but just encountering, like, you know, Marni and all these different people just it made me see that it could be done. Yeah, I don't know. Which was maybe by, back with your other question, like, which is what kept me going? Like, the idea that you could that writing was something to be enjoyed, not like just after you written, but that it was like it was something that you had to find in the process itself.
Kate Carpenter 44:12
Who else do you like to read as inspiration?
Andrew Edwards 44:15
I read a ton of novels, like, all the time. So, yeah, I've been working through, what's her name? It's R. F. Kuang, the dark academia series, right now. So I thought, I don't know. Have you read, have you encountered Katabasis? Do you know what I'm talking about?
Kate Carpenter 44:29
I am aware of it. I haven't read it yet.
Andrew Edwards 44:30
Well, her premise that academia is hell is evocative. No, you know, not 100% sure. But, um, you could, you can tell she's on the job market this year, is really all, I've got to say. Yeah, I don't know. I read novels, and I read tons of historians and and I read a lot of newspapers and magazines and all sorts of different stuff. For me, it's like the--it took, or so, I guess there's two things honestly. One is like, when I was in graduate school, when I was like, grinding it out in those five and a half years, like I just stopped reading fiction completely for a couple of reasons. One, I felt like I didn't have time. And B, it was like, actually painful to me to read things that I liked, prose that wasn't academic. And it took a few years after to get back into reading fiction, which also coincided with the ability to have more fun writing and having more fun, more joy in writing, in a sense, like finding the balance that like fiction allows you. So that's one. And the second thing is, like, I don't know, this is very professional, but I guess this that's okay, is that I like, it doesn't matter. So I really like re reading theory and rereading sources, like re reading the two of them together, or reading, you know, really, really reading into primary sources and then taking a break. And by break, I mean like going to read Marx, or going to read Freud, or going to read any kind of like any or like any kind of these theorists who are trying to explain the world and then go that sort of, I don't know, to me, like the, and I don't write like any of those people, but to me, there's like, there's like, a lot of joy to be found in like, sort of moving between these different registers of like, unintelligibility, on the one hand, or the attempt to capture deep answers about reality, and, you know, the archive of people just sort of struggling to move through their their daily life, and there's a lot of pleasure in doing both. But then there's also it gives me like, to my mind, like, that's where, that's sort of what feeds this thing in the center, which is neither, which is the narrative itself.
Kate Carpenter 46:41
Before I let you go. Are you working on something new these days?
Andrew Edwards 46:44
No. That's not true. Um, I don't know what the book I'm going to write is next, which is really fascinating. Like, it feels like this book just got done. Like, I really, like, I got through the process of, like, finalizing all the various different bits and pieces that was like, last July. But yeah, what am I working on? I'm working on, like, basically, like, a whole bunch of different, I'm kind of like, I'm trying to figure out, like, what like the most--No, I guess I'm trying to do two things like, one, I'm thinking through what the next project's gonna be. There's two big possibilities, Kate, neither of which are satisfying. One is I had this really bizarre history to go, the urge to go, even more esoteric, and write a history of the commodity as a way of thinking at the turn of the 17th century, like in the Age of Exploration, quote, unquote, just because I did enough research to find out that you could actually do this, like that it was physically possible. So I thought it would be really fun to tell a story, also maybe devastating to tell a story of like these people who are going out and having to come up with a new way to understand or altered way of understanding exchange, but also encountering different kinds of people and places and things and objects and all that different stuff. And to think about, like, the problem of encounter as being like a problem of the recreation of a certain set of I don't know, approaches to the world. That's still kind of exciting to me. And then the other thing is that, like, after I finished the book, I like, and this did not happen all the way through the length of it. But when I finally finished doing the proofs, I had this really bizarre experience, which is that, like, I finally liked it, like, you know what I mean? Like, I read the last, the last time I read it, I was like, you know, this is pretty good. And then I was just like, I should, like, write a sequel. Well, I, yeah. Whether, which one of those I'm doing, I don't know. I'm well, yeah, who, who, who, who knows. It's really bizarre. Having finished a book, you're like, you know, it's almost like, now you have to write more of them. Is that the way it works?
Kate Carpenter 48:56
I don't think you have to.
Andrew Edwards 48:57
But also there, but no, it's like, I guess. What I mean is that I don't know. I guess it's fun to see, it's fun to see a story on a book scale that you made yourself. It's like it feels like you've moved from being a, for me, it feels like I've moved from being like an appreciator to being a producer in some weird way, which is really moving on some strange level. Like it's embarrassing to say that, so I'm glad I put it on your podcast.
Kate Carpenter 49:22
Well, on the note of embarrassing you. Dr, Andrew Edwards, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past.
Andrew Edwards 49:28
Thanks Kate. What a pleasure.
Kate Carpenter 49:30
Thanks again to Andrew for joining me and to you for listening. If you want to check out Andrew's book or any of the other books mentioned in this episode, go to draftingthepast.com to find links and a complete transcript. If you're enjoying the podcast and you want to help me keep it going, consider becoming a supporter on Patreon. For as little as $3 a month, you'll get access to ad free episodes, and higher levels get merch and other bonus perks. Go to patreon.com/draftingthepast to check it out. Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
