I've recently begun to read Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction, and I'm having a bit of a hard time with it. The drama of global finance is apparently a bit beyond me. I will, for example, read that such-and-such country devalued their currency, or switched away from the gold standard, or imposed tariffs on imports... Okay, I think I sort of understand what those actions are. But these acts are written about as if their consequence and importance are obvious. And to many, I am sure they are, but not for me, and I don't think I'm uniquely underprepared. This is, in fact, a general trend for me whenever any kind of economic history pops up. Another recent example for me was Thomas Skidmore's The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil: 1964-1985. A huge fraction of that book turned out to be a discussion of Eurodollars, IMF loans, pegged currency exchanges, inflation... and I can't say I understood much of it at all. In fact, I just sort of nodded my head and powered through.

I've tried to pick up textbooks on these subjects, but I've found them to be heavily mathematical. Ironically, this should make things easier, as math and physics are my background. I can understand what the textbooks are saying just fine, but it really has done very little to help me when reading economic history. It seems a bit like staring at the Navier-Stokes equation to understand the weather. I also looked through the suggested books and resources list, but couldn't find anything on economic history.

So, in essence, how do historians, not all of whom I assume have PhDs in economics, make sense of questions of credit rates, monetary policy, inflation, etc? If their field is not necessarily economic history, what do they do when faced with a source that requires a good knowledge of finance/economics? And how can I, an amateur history reader, gain a basic enough understanding that I can read history without feeling totally lost when a discussion of, say, interest rates come up?