This collection of essays brings together international scholars examining eighteenth-century economies and cultural responses to and representations of them. Like other similar collections, it attends to the influence of finance and commerce on literary representations of the personal (subjectivity) and political (nationalism) especially in Britain.

But this collection broadens the topical and geographical perspective by including studies on such topics as fashion, advertising, cartography, and the trade in currency, tobacco, grain, quina, and fur in France, Germany, Spain, the American colonies, Mexico, the Levant, and China.

Where writers of the time conceived trade uniting all in one global economy, the interdisciplinary essays in Global Economies, Cultural Currencies of the Eighteenth Century collectively describe continuities and discontinuities among economic cultures then and now.