Money's been around for a long time, but the study of what it says, and how it's used, economics, got its western origin in the pithy tome The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.
Written in the auspicious year of 1776, Smith outlines how the origin of money is to supply laborers with a mechanism to fill their needs without producing everything themselves. And that this consequence of differentiation amongst labor gives rise to the capacity for groups of humans to do novel productive things.
The question then is what group of humans we should care about with respect to this novel production, and Smith put the answer to that in the title.
By tying economics to nations, Smith became the first political-economist. This allows for a tastefully reductive definition of the large political ideologies. But first the means of production.
Smith said that three things were needed for novel production: land, capital, and labor. In 1776, land literally meant land, but nowadays it includes all the non-living machinery used in making things. Capital is the money that goes into the production. And labor is the collection of humans that come together to produce the thing.
So choose your own adventure time:
How Is Capital Deployed - how money is used in production
How Political Systems Align To The Means Of Production - political-economic systems