Required Reading:
William Stanley Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875), chaps. 1 and 4, at least (available on-line)
M. M. Postan, “The Rise of a Money Economy,” Economic History Review (1944). [JSTOR]

Further Reading:
Marcel Mauss, Essay on the Gift: Form and Function of Exchange in Archaic Society (1925).
Craig Muldrew, " 'Hard Food for Midas': Cash and its Social Value in Early Modern England," Past and Present 170 (Feb. 2001), 78-120 [on-line via JSTOR].
Thomas Sargent and François Velde, The Big Problem of Small Change (2002).
Peter Spufford, Money and its Uses in Medieval Europe (1988).
Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, 1450-1920 (1976).

See also:
William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy (1871), available on-line.
Harro Maas, William Stanley Jevons and the Making of Modern Economics (2005).
Philip Mirowski, "Macroeconomic Instability and the 'Natural' Processes in early Neoclassical Economics," Journal of Economic History 44:2 (1984), 345-354, [on-line via JSTOR]--about Jevons' effort to attribute economic fluctuation to sunspot activity.

do you need money if you can trade one red paperclip for a house?

where are The Society Islands, and is money used there today?