Money

A member of staff at a food bank

What centuries of cost-of-living crises can reveal

An ink drawing of a London 'rag fair' where old clothes and textiles were traded, c1800

Regency inequality: the gap between rich and poor in Georgian Britain

The debtors’ exercise grounds at Newgate prison in 1809. The debtors’ prison was a feature of everyday life in 18th-century England (Photo by Rischgitz/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Inside debtors’ prisons: what life was like for people jailed in Georgian Britain

A painting by Dutch artist Hendrick Danckerts shows Charles II’s gardener, John Rose, presenting the king with a pineapple

Pineapples, tulips and follies: 10 status symbols from history

Howard Hughes: the troubled tycoon

The House of Commons in Sir Robert Walpole's administration

Your guide toThe South Sea Bubble

Debtors’ prisons: Dickensian horrors or economic successes?

The Bank of England: everything you wanted to know

What can one woman reveal about Jewish life in medieval England?

Charles V of Spain depicted on a 16th-century gold coin

Kwasi Kwarteng"Wars are bloody expensive – so the only way nations can buy what they need is by printing their own money"

The Napoleon of Fleet Street

A loan transaction being recorded in a ledger, shown in a work by Marinus Van Reymerswaele

Medieval money tricks and the modern world

Gold rushes: everything you wanted to know

A 16th-century portrait of Bess of Hardwick. Bess's talent, ambition and eye for a well-connected husband elevated her to dizzying levels of wealth and power in Tudor England. (Photo by Bridgeman Art Library)

Bess of Hardwick: schemer, social climber, scourge of Elizabeth I

Cartoon from American satirical magazine Puck, c1885, showing American millionaires playing Monopoly with the country's assets

Who were the tycoons of the Gilded Age? Meet the ruthless 'robber barons' who made millions

John Duval Gluck, Jr, 'the Santa Claus man', pictured left, visiting the General Post Office to promote the Santa Claus Association’s benefit show

The con man who saved Christmas

A broker looks at his screens at Frankfurt's stock exchange on 15 September 2008. (Photo by Thomas Lohnes/AFP/Getty Images)

The 2008 financial crisis explained

Lord Fiske, chairman of the Decimal Currency Board, makes a purchase at a Woolworths using the new currency on Decimal Day, 15 February 1971

Decimal Day: when Britain said farewell to the shilling

The then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump taking part in the final presidential debate at the Thomas & Mack Center on the campus of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, 19 October 2016. Trump repeatedly claimed that the election was “rigged” against him. (Photo by Joe Raedle/AFP/Getty Images)

A brief history of election “rigging” in the United States

A Wall Street speculator tries to sell his car to passersby

Your guide to the Great Depression

Scores of people milled about the entrance to the Stock Exchange on 24 October 1929, as the market went through the greatest shake up in its history. It was a light tremor heralding the earthquake to come. (Photo by NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

The Wall Street Crash: the day the bubble burst

American business magnate JD Rockefeller sits at a desk

Q&AWho was the first billionaire?

Rutger Bregman. (Photo by Maartje ter Horst)

Rutger Bregman: historian in the news

Illustration by Femke de Jong

Does it always pay to trust the cash in your pockets?

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange after the closing bell on 29 September 2008. A record 778 points were wiped off the Dow Jones that day, as the 2008 financial crisis pushed the world's banking system to the edge of collapse. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The credit crunch: "It's a story of hubris followed by a fall"

By the time George II came to the throne in 1727, Britain was a nation addicted to gaming. A Georgian gaming table is shown in this sketch by Thomas Rowlandson. (Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images)

“A nation addicted to gaming”: the Georgians’ crackdown on addictive betting

Nurses serve lunch to patients at a Birmingham hospital, 1939. (Photo by Humphrey Spender/Picture Post/Getty Images)

What was healthcare like in Britain before the NHS?

The LibraryHow King Henry I made and blew a fortune

(Photo by Katie Edwards/Alamy Stock Photo)

Do we really live in a less charitable society than 50 years ago?

While young ladies may have been daydreaming of handsome film stars such as Cary Grant, pictured here kissing the cheek of Ingrid Bergman in a publicity still for the 1946 film ‘Notorious’, agony aunts were keen to bring them back down to earth. (Photo by John Springer Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

How to be a man: tips from 1930s agony aunts