The most important word in the title of Timothy Alborn's expansive and revealing history of gold in Britain is “all.” This is not because he aims to discuss all of the ways gold was used—enticing subjects such as alchemy, medicine, and misers are topics for another day—nor is it based on a presumption that all that needs to be understood about gold can be found in British history. Indeed, British encounters with people using gold in other parts of the world are a recurring theme. Rather, the pronoun refers to the fact that the history of gold is too often only half told as a story about money. Historians, Alborn argues, like many nineteenth-century Britons, have been too wedded to an Enlightenment mythology that saw the metal's ultimate purpose as currency or as a reserve for commercial credit, a myth that was reinforced over two centuries through Britain's informal and then formal commitment to gold-based monetary policies. The gold standard, according to this “just-so” story (30), was the apex of historical and civilizational development that Britain then bequeathed to the world following the gold rushes of the mid-nineteenth century.
What this story leaves out is hinted at in a startling fact, shared in the introduction and repeated several times throughout the book: before 1850, only about half of the gold that was used in Britain was used as currency or bank reserves (5). However reluctant they were to admit it, the British had plenty of other uses for gold, including as “adornment” (10), the most commonly referenced term in a word cloud generated from Alborn's extensive database of sources (more on that in a moment). The uses for commodity gold varied, and were widely discussed and debated. Gold appeared in textiles, jewelry, cutlery, and plate; it was worn by monarchs, soldiers, servants, and mayors; it adorned altars, was pounded into commemorative medals, preserved in museums, and purchased abroad as souvenirs by British travelers. As different as these practices were from the minting of guineas or sovereigns, the primary objective of All that Glittered is to embrace this wider, richer, world and to demonstrate just how inseparable the culture and economics of gold were to each other.
One challenge of the book is the need to account for both thematic and chronological questions, but with a particular emphasis on the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries when the political economy of international war, trade, and finance turned on Britain's ability to fund its own armies and those of its allies, to weather the depletion of its gold reserves with a turn to paper currency, and to rebuild its economy and trade in the aftermath of Waterloo. These topics are addressed in chapters 3, 4, and 5, and are bookended by others that discuss the movement of gold into Britain—primarily from Brazil (via Lisbon) in the eighteenth century, followed by Russia, the United States, and the British Empire in the nineteenth century—and the ways that the British used gold in other ways to order and make meaningful their cultural, social, and imperial identities.
These were far from static practices, and the work of adapting and revising traditional uses and meanings for new times is richly explored in discussions of gold's moral implications, how it functioned as a marker of class and status, and the comparisons that it enabled Britons to make (invariably to their own advantage) between themselves and other nations and cultures. A bracelet worn on the arm of a South Asian man, for example, could indicate the “barbaric” misuse of gold that might otherwise be put into circulation (118), whereas a similar bracelet worn on the arm of an Eastern European peasant could offer a “picturesque” display of folk culture (122). In both cases, the comparison offered implicit reinforcement of British superiority. Similarly, while the British loved nothing more than to pity the violent and corrupting influence of gold in early modern Iberian empires, this did not stop them from recasting nineteenth-century investments in Brazilian mines or Australian gold fields as demonstrations of Anglo-Saxon invention and pluck (183).
A book on gold is fraught with the potential for hackneyed metaphors, but if there is one that must be made it is on behalf of Alborn's patient and impressive panning of primary sources. Gold's many uses and meanings rest in a cultural sediment that only digital tools can properly sift, and for this project Alborn and a team of (credited) graduate students compiled a database of nearly 28,000 references, drawn from well over 10,000 sources (9). It is one thing to note that a story has been dominated by a one-sided narrative of monetary history, but it is quite another to dig so comprehensively and deeply into the textual strata that such research enables, let alone to emerge with a coherent account that deepens our understanding of Britain's enduring relationship with gold.
It is this endurance that most directly links cultural and economic history in this case. The global consolidation of a gold standard after 1848 was not just the fortuitous result of discoveries in California or New South Wales any more than it was the convenience of a supposedly neutral institution. For well over a century beforehand, Britain struggled to order the material flow of gold and contain its contradictory meanings. That struggle resulted in a lasting familiarity with gold that positioned Britain to survive the transformations of the later nineteenth century, albeit at the cost of losing its position as gold's largest consumer. Alborn demonstrates, in his argument and methods, just how rich a cultural history of economic life can be.
