Tim Salzer

PhD Candidate: C05 Financial infrastructures and geo-economic Security

Career

Current Research Project

Money and the gaze of the state, 1949-2022

When asked how to define money, only few people would intuitively defend the point of view that it is a “means for the provision of collective security”. Yet, there are actually good reasons to do so, at least if we talk about our contemporary world. As past scholarship has demonstrated, with the global diffusion of Anti-Money Laundering policies and Counter the Financing of Financing schemes during the last decades, consequential distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate uses of money have been drawn, novel forms of social deviance have been created and new devices for surveillance were constructed. In the course of this process, political authorities around the globe have engaged in framing certain patterns of behavior involving money as potentially dangerous to social order. As a consequence, data about monetary transactions have become a source of information that state administrations use to assess the moral worth and trustworthiness of its own citizens as well as foreigners. Under the impetus of these legislative and technological changes, money itself has, to some extent, come to play a different role in the overall organization of society, evolving into an instrument that is used to secure a certain collective way of life and to enforce certain moral imperatives regarding economic behavior. In other words, money has become a tool for the exercise of social control.

In my own research, I use these insights as point of departure for a historical inquiry in the manyfold ways by which political authorities have used money as a tool to moralize economic behavior. My wager is that the interweaving of money and social control has a relatively long history, whose study will help us to develop a better understanding of the specificities of the present. In particular, I am interested in the different social practices and technologies that are involved in the monitoring of monetary flows, the identification of suspicious transactions and the enacting of regulations meant to prevent unwanted economic behavior from occurring. My empirical case is the Chinese political economy since the communist revolution in 1949, where money has been a tool to enforce certain moral imperatives on work units from the very beginning of the Maoist period. One aim of my research is to explore how the workings of money as instrument for social control in the planned economy mirror some of its current functions, especially given more recent developments in the Chinese monetary architecture such as the development of the digital Yuan.

Key research activities

• Sociology, Anthropology and History of Money and Finance
• Sociology and Anthropology of Technology and Infrastructures
• China, Communism and Post-Communism
• Textual statistics, Text as data

Publications

• Salzer, Tim. Money and the gaze of the state, China 1949-2022. Intersections of Finance and Society Conference, City University of London, 15-16 September 2022.
• Salzer, Tim. Review of Monnaie, Souveraineté et Démocratie, by Alban Mathieu and Thomas Boccon-Gibod (ed.), Lectures, September 2022: https://journals.openedition.org/lectures/57908
• Salzer, Tim. Review of Burma’s Economy in the Twentieth Century, by Ian Brown. Péninsule, vol. 45, no. 3, May 2014, pp. 193-199. 
• Salzer, Tim. Review of Divided over Thaksin: Thailand’s Coup and Problematic Transition, by John Funston et al. Péninsule, vol. 45, no. 3, May 2014, pp. 180-188.