Becton Fellowship Program: Making Money in the French Revolution. Rebecca L. Spang

Event time: 
Thursday, February 7, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm
Location: 
Edward P. Evans Hall - School of Management (EVANS) See map
165 Whitney Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

Money creation is usually understood as a matter of economic policy, but it also involves political choices and physical manufacture. In this talk, Rebecca Spang will examine one of the most famous instances of monetary innovation—the French Revolution’s issuing of paper assignats—and the social, cultural, and political dynamics of which it was a part. Of all revolutions, monetary ones may be the most difficult to pull off successfully.

Rebecca Spang is the author of two prize-winning books on politics, culture, and consumption in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Her The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Harvard University Press) asks how going out to eat became an enjoyable leisure activity, while Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution (also published by Harvard) explores the interaction of political crisis and financial upheaval in the 1790s and beyond. She has held visiting appointments at the University of Tübingen and the University of Minnesota, was a Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows, and was previously Reader in European History, University College London.

The Becton Fellowship Program was established at the Yale School of Management in 1980 by Becton, Dickinson & Co., a leading global medical instruments supplier, in honor of Henry P. Becton ’37 B.S., company chairman (1961-1987), to bring practitioners from private and public institutions to share their professional insights with faculty and students.

Follow Rebecca on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RebeccaSpang

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