AAs a child and teenager, I had little to do with money. I was educated on scholarships and state hand-outs and the kindness of strange adults, and this money passed over my head. I started thinking seriously about money only in 1978, in the city of Jeddah on the Red Sea.

I had come to Jeddah to delay my induction into the money society at home, to postpone the passage into adulthood.

I had got a job working at a newspaper I’ll call the Saudi News. It was in a plywood building at the end of the airport runway. The newspaper, the building and the airport have all since vanished, for they were embarrassing physical reminders of an earlier age in Saudi history, the years before 1973, before money. The quadruple rise in the price of crude oil at the end of that year had detonated the world’s trading system, and money was streaming into Saudi Arabia as nowhere and never before, trailing its usual baggage of power and influence. The burden of history had passed to a few pale, fat men gliding like phantoms at noon into their Lincolns. The Muslim civilizations of Egypt and India, with their ancient architecture and worldly cultures, had become worthless; Europeans and Americans waited for days in the ante-rooms of dozing assistant deputy under-secretaries of state; the British, who had once set up and knocked down these princelings, wheedled and bribed with the best of them.

At about this time, a further change came over my life. The money from Jeddah began to breed, convulsively. While I slept, or was drunk, or made love, or smoked a Benson on the porch, my money worked and, as far as I could tell, for greater reward than I did. I felt a regret: the lightness which comes with empty pockets, the airy, tremulous sense of self which had been mine throughout my teens, the alienation from even the fabric of commercial society, its street corners and bullying office blocks and lighted shops, was now lost to me, possibly for ever. I felt obscurely disabled. It was as if the subject of my enquiry, while relieving me of labour and care, were also mocking me.

In analysing this new situation, I thought perhaps there was some quality about my labour from 1978 to 1980, some particular virtue that gave it uncommon power in commanding the labour of others. I once accosted a man in the South Seas who was planting some taro root; he told me that this action, which took up a full twenty minutes of a rainy morning, was enough to keep his family in food and grog and cash for a year. No doubt at the depths of every rentier’s existence, from duke to retiree, there is the faint shadow cast by some dead labour, but it is lost in the glitter of possession and present income.

In this, I was fortunate. The disesteem of money, symbolized by inflation, existed alongside a new and exaggerated esteem for money. In Britain, Germany, the states of central Europe, Russia, Latin America–indeed, everywhere I went, but particularly in Britain–money was quickly displacing all other psychological goals. Duty, religion, public service, liberty, equality, justice or aristocracy, the cultural flesh that clothed the bones of money for those that possessed it, all became suspect: only money, it seemed, was to be trusted. In Britain, at least, this undoubtedly had to do with the frustrations of those dynamic social groups– young people, immigrants, women–who had had it up to here with the senile prattle of a society they thought ripe for the boneyard. In Russia and Eastern Europe, money took on the character of emancipation and modernity more comprehensively than even the early paper money of the United States or the first issues of assignats in revolutionary Paris: it was Dostoevsky, after all, who described money as ‘coined liberty’, and in the Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848, Marx and Engels showed a healthy respect for capitalism:

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.

Only money could measure success or failure, happiness or misery. Only money could reward or punish. States and governments must just stand back, and money–which contains all knowledge and reconciles all clashes of human will–would see us right. Money was good.