Money. It’s as fundamental to our lives as air, water, fire and earth. It is the fifth element, without which humankind would struggle to survive.

Now, global economist David McWilliams has written a brilliantly original book to tie in with a major TV series exploring our relationship with money and how it sustains the existence of civilisation as we know it. In Money, McWilliams aims to do for cash what David Attenborough did for the Planet: to unlock its mysteries, its limitations and its awesome power. We journey all across the world, through the present and the past, to survey the ever-evolving dynamics of money in a way that has never been seen before. We’ll go from the birthplace of money in the Middle East to where trade began along the silk road to China; we’ll explore markets from Marrakech to Wall Street. We’ll uncover the dawn of our relationship with money and track its history to more fully understand man’s current relationship with it, and its impact on the world right now.

The story of money is the story of modernity. It’s the story of our desires, our genius and our downfalls, and has shaped the very essence of what it means to be human. And yet despite money’s primacy, most of us don’t truly understand it. Where does money come from? How much is out there? Who controls it? Nothing we’ve invented as a species has defined our own evolution so thoroughly and changed the direction of our planet’s history so dramatically. Money is power - and power beguiles, power sparkles and power unleashes our deepest cravings.

So then, the story of Money is the story of earth’s most inventive, destructive and dangerous animal, Homo Sapiens. Our story.