Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Repositioning the study of global currencies from below, Dollarizations introduces the concept of "popular currency" to explore what it means to "live" the dollar. This concept takes shape around four themes: political authority, social stratification, collective identity, and historical memory. Drawing on thirteen country specific case studies across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe, Dollarizations reveals a social and political dimension of global currency that monetary theory has neglected. Reaching beyond the dollar, this framework increases our understanding of how any global currency becomes familiar, legitimate, and lived by ordinary people, at a time when the yuan and cryptocurrencies enter the contest for monetary supremacy.
Ariel Wilkis is Professor of Sociology at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), where he serves as Dean of the Escuela IDAES, and is a Senior Researcher at CONICET. His work sits at the intersection of economic sociology, political sociology, and the anthropology of money. He is the author of The Moral Power of Money (Stanford University Press, 2017) and co-author of The Dollar: How the U.S. Dollar Became a Popular Currency in Argentina (University of New Mexico Press, 2023).
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction. Dollarizations: The Popular Life of a Global Currency
Ariel Wilkis
Chapter 1. The US Dollar in Argentina: Socio-History of a Popular Currency
Mariana Luzzi and Ariel Wilkis
Chapter 2. The Relations between the Venezuelan Popular Sectors and the Dollar during the Governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro (1999-2024)
Omar Vázquez Heredia
Chapter 3. Economic Elites and the Media in the Legalization of the Dollar in Ecuador
Andrés Chiriboga-Tejada and Isabel Ramos
Chapter 4. Official Dollarization from Below: The Popular Life of the Dollar in Ecuador
Luis Emilio Martínez
Chapter 5. Dollars in Haiti: Colonial Legacies and Monetary Pluralities.
Federico Neiburg
Chapter 6. The Dual Currency in Cuba (2003-2021): The “Dollar of Our Own”
Flore Pavy
Chapter 7. Social and Monetary Arrangements: Economic Strategies based on the Dollarization of Cuban Society following Monetary Unification in 2021
Osnaide Izquierdo Quintana
Chapter 8. The Right Money for Making Money: US Dollars and Bitcoin in 21st Century El Salvador
Jorge E. Cuéllar and David Pedersen
Chapter 9. The Imagined Dollar: Beliefs, Expectations, and Financial Lives on the US-Mexico Border
Magdalenda Villarreal
Chapter 10. Crisis Redux: Zimbabwe’s Dollarization in Historical Perspective
Stefan Mikuska
Chapter 11. Ramshackle Dollarization: The Social Topography of (In-) fungibility in Multi-Currency Era Zimbabwe (2009-2019)
Chris Vasantkumar
Chapter 12. The Many Lives of the US Dollar in Vietnam
Allison Truitt
Chapter 13. Fortune or Homelessness? Dollar Loans and Evictions in Georgia
Ia Eradze
Afterword
Horacio Ortiz
Index