Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich

by Thomas Levenson

The second was more subtle but at least as vital. The various forms of borrowing invented over the last years of the seventeenth century shared one critical feature. They were all forms of property that, though vastly more abstract than a piece of land or a bolt of cloth, still existed as a claim on the future.