Opening paragraphs................

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the where-withal:  call it what you like, money matters.  To Christians, the love of money is the root of all evil.  To generals, it is the sinews of war; to revolutionaries, the shackles of labour.  But what exactly is money?  Is it a mountain of silver, as the Spanish conquistadors thought?  Or will mere clay tablets and printed paper suffice?  How did we come to live in a world where most money is invisible, little more than numbers on a computer screen?  Where did the money come from?  And where did it all go?
Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money