If you said that a principal cause of the 2008 financial crisis was an explosion in credit, most economic commentators would nod their heads in agreement. If you then said this credit boom was due to lax monetary policy, you’d still earn a healthy fraction of nods. If you then asserted that America’s departure from the gold standard caused the lax monetary policy, not many folks would be nodding. Nevertheless, this attenuated causal chain has been embraced by a motley collection of wonks, cranks and presidential candidates: Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Steve Forbes, David Stockman and politicians whose last name is Paul. These gold bugs have a deep suspicion of fiat currency. They fret that governments that can just print money will be tempted to print even more, triggering inflation, currency depreciation and worse. Most citizens do not share this obsession, but they might share an unease about the dollar being backed by nothing more than a social convention to treat greenbacks as if they are worth more than the paper they are printed on.

It is this unease that Kwasi Kwarteng tries to tap into with “War and Gold.” A Cambridge-educated historian, Conservative member of Parliament in Britain and the author of the excellent “Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World,” Kwarteng attempts to recount 500 years of monetary history in accessible prose. He makes his thesis clear at the outset: The history of money is one of oscillation between “periods of monetary chaos,” when governments issue fiat currency, and “periods of relative order,” when currencies are linked to gold. The bulk of “War and Gold” is devoted to observing that things seemed much, much better during eras when currencies were tied to gold. In his introduction, Kwarteng explicitly says he is not advocating a return to the pre-1914 gold standard. Rather than echoing Rand Paul, Kwarteng writes more like a Tory nostalgic for the solidity of Robert Peel in 19th-century England or the Eisenhower era in 20th-century America.

At the outset, Kwarteng says, “This book is a work of history. It is not a tract of economic theory.” His statement reveals both the biggest strengths and weaknesses of “War and Gold.” One strength is in the lucidity of Kwarteng’s narrative style. “War and Gold” manages to sweeten the abstruse parts of his monetary history with anecdotes about the major actors — gamblers like John Law (a Scotsman who engineered a massive financial bubble in 18th-century France) or statesmen like Joseph Dodge (an American who tamed inflation in post-1945 Germany and Japan). Kwarteng has a flair for the elegant turn of phrase. He describes the Bretton Woods system that prioritized policy autonomy over open capital markets as one in which “domestic policies would be lead partner in the dance.” As a good historian, Kwarteng also acknowledges some occasions when the facts do not go his way. He is candid, for example, that the United States’ adherence to the gold standard helped cause the credit bubble in the 1920s that led to the 1929 stock market crash.

When it comes to fiat currency, ­however, “War and Gold” tries and fails to convert modest correlation into strong causation. Kwarteng is correct to point out that ­before 1918, fiat currency tended to be associated with massive economic uncertainty. This elides the rather important fact that countries usually issued such currencies during times of war or revolution, and maybe it was those events, and not the paper currency, that were responsible for the economic chaos. Kwarteng should be aware of this — the book is called “War and Gold” after all — but he focuses much more on the paper currency and much less on the reasons behind it.