Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview on “monetary economics.” It presents the historical perspective regarding the body of modern monetary discussion. The problems of attempting an exercise of this sort are acute in the field of monetary writing, where there is an enormous and prolix literature covering several centuries of effort. The nature of money has been an issue throughout the development of monetary theory. The chapter discusses the theories of the demand for money, distinguishing between the approaches that emphasize velocity and the demand for balances. In considering approaches to the supply of money, it is easy to find independent supply and demand-determined supply in the literature over a long period, and this leads to different approaches to monetary control in the 19th-century debates and in the 20th-century literature. Some of the differences over monetary control relate to different approaches to the rate of interest. The chapter illustrates that the major source of division concerning monetary control is the transmission mechanisms.