In the modern world, while money undoubtedly has the capacity to transform social values and relations, those same values and relations also have considerable reciprocal power to transform money and invest it with meaning and social patterns. Money is not a culturally neutral or socially anonymous object, but rather is profoundly marked by varying cultural and social structures. Many of the contributors to this volume share this perspective, but they examine how money has been linked to nation - or empire building. People also make every effort to embed money in particular times, places and social relations. In the midst of the standardization and homogenization of national currencies, people continually disrupted monetary uniformity by differentiating money at a micro-level through earmarking and the creation of special forms of currency. There is no single, uniform, generalized money, but multiple monies.

Money is a symbolic token and money's symbolism comes from its social circulation and the trust invested in it necessary to its circulation. The token forms of money that make up modern national currencies were made possible only when a more direct relationship between state and society was created with the rise of the nation state. This direct relationship not only gave the state the ability to regulate the forms of money used by the population. It also encouraged the use of token forms of money by cultivating the trust of the population in the state's ability to manage the value of this form of money. In this way, the sociological understanding of money helps to link the rise of national currencies to that of the nation-state. The relationship between trust and money is not merely an historical phenomenon but persists as a constitutive element of contemporary monetary networks.

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