The Euro and Its Rivals Currency and the Construction of a Transnational City [Paperback]

Gustav Peebles takes an anthropological look at two seemingly separate developments in Europe at the turn of the millennium: the rollout of the euro and the building of new transnational regions such as the Oresund Region, envisioned as a melding of Copenhagen, Denmark, with Malm?, Sweden. Peebles argues that the drive to create such transnational spaces is inseparable from the drive to create a pan-national currency. He studies the practices and rhetoric surrounding the national currencies of Denmark and Sweden, the euro, and several new local currencies struggling to come into being. The Euro and Its Rivals provides a deep historical study of the welfare state and the monetary policies and utopian visions that helped to ground it, at the same time shedding new light on the contemporary movement of goods, people, credit, and debt.

Gustav Peebles is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Chair of Social Sciences in the Bachelors Program at The New School in New York City. His work has appeared in Harpers Magazine and other publications.

Peebles adopts an anthropological approach to the question of how the roll-out of the euro has influenced the emergence of transnational regions in Europe, such as the Oresund region encompassing Copenhagen, Denmark, and Malmo, Sweden.A highly original and creative contribution to literature on the anthropology of Europe . . . . A sophisticated account and a considerable achievement.A fascinating and nicely documented account of the creation of, and resistances to, a transnational social formation in one of the so-called 'Regions' of the new Europe.

Contents
Introduction
1. Imagining Utopia, Constructing ?resund: From the Nation-State to the Region
2. The Arts of Scientific Money: Monetary Policy as Moral Policy
3. Receipts and Deceits: Currency Regulation, Black Markets and Borders
4. The Mark of Money: Regulating the Flow of Subjects
5. Indebted Communities
Notes
Bibliography
Index