This book demonstrates the relevance of the historical perspective with respect to national and international payment systems. Its analysis of national and international payments develops along a dialectical path that starts with the work of the Classics (thesis), undergoes a radical turn with the advent of the neoclassical school (antithesis), and reaches the modern theory of emissions passing through Keynes’s contribution (synthesis). That the history of economic thought occupies a legitimate place in the field of historical studies is beyond dispute. What may be less well understood...