2, 500 years of international currencies the future of the U.S. dollar as well as crypto and central bank digital currencies are revealed. Recently the US dollar has fallen more than 10 per cent against other major currencies since the beginning of 2025, and this especially has questioned the its future, that how long can it remain the world’s premier currency and should it fall what will replace it? Doubts about the international dominance of the dollar are only growing amid worries about tariffs, political dysfunction and fraying international alliances.

In Money Beyond Borders, Barry Eichengreen, a leading authority on international currencies, puts the dollar’s prospects in deep historical perspective by chronicling the entire history of cross-border currencies, from the invention of coins in the seventh century BCE to the cryptocurrencies of today and the central bank digital currencies of tomorrow.

Eichengreen examines the US dollar and the latest line of global currencies  those commanding widespread international use – beginning with Athenian silver coins of the sixth century BC, and extending through  the Roman denarius, the Byzantine solidus (The dollar of Middle Ages), the Florentine florin, the Spanish “pieces of eight”, the Dutch Guilder and finally the British Pound Sterling.

Money Beyond Borders recounts how Greek and Roman coins became the first true international currencies, and tell us how the Florentine Gold Florin became the “Greenback of the Renaissance” and how it was succeeded by Spanish silver and a Dutch fiat currency. The book also explains why the British pound dominated the international economy in the nineteenth century, why the dollar rose to the top during the World War II, and why the dollar has survived predictions of the imminent loss of its pre-eminence since the 1970s.

The long history of international currencies reveals the same factors that encourage their widespread use eventually lead to their abandonment, and makes a powerful case that the dollar is now on the downside of this cycle, and it considers who the winners and losers will be when there is flight away from the greenback. This book offer valuable lessons and insights about how currencies rise – and why they fall.

Eichengreen writes “International currency status is not forever, akin to an endowment of natural resource wealth. “ It can be managed well, in which case it is an asset for current and future generations, or it can be managed poorly, in which case it becomes a curse.”

According to Eichengreen, a Professor at the University of California, when US dollar loses it mantle, the wounds will more likely be self-inflicted than exacted by a monetary foe. Among the possible fatal harms, he identifies heightened tariffs, America’s escalating fiscal woes, the undermining of Federal Reserve independence, more aggressive and widespread use of financial sanctions and a retreat from long-standing international alliances. Donald Trump, the current US President has more than leaned in all these directions. 

Eichengreen assesses threats to the dollar, after all, the financialisation of the modern US economy, whereby profitmaking has migrated from industry to finance, has been widely documented.

Critics across the political spectrum have noted how an overvalued dollar, by making US exports less competitive, has contributed to the hollowing out of manufacturing industry and working class communities across the rustbelt, helping fuel the political upheavals of the past decade including the rise of Donald Trump and the Maga movement. If US exporters are struggling with a strong dollar, he says all they need do is take counter balancing steps-“Invest more in plant and equipment, train their workers better, develop new products and processes”.

If such steps had not occurred to the exporters in question: and as if manufacturers in China and other competitive markets, with cheaper currencies, couldn’t also take them.

Historical global currencies dominated the monetary scene for at least a century but all were superseded.

Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto by Barry Eichengreen, Princeton £25, 344 pages.