And the reader who wants to know how finance is interwoven with general history would do better to turn to Jeffry Frieden's excellent 2006 work, “Global Capitalism”. The finance specialist will not find enough here to begin to compete with the work of Charles Kindleberger, an economic historian. Yet the reader is left wondering quite who the book is aimed at. And he rehearses the story of financial risk from its origins in Enlightenment Scotland. He describes how manias have repeatedly engulfed greedy investors over the centuries-concentrating on John Law, whose schemes ruined 18th-century France. He explains how the bond market had its origins in the state's need for money to finance war. He traces the transformation of banchieri, named for the benches where money was changed, into the families that dominated the political and cultural life of Renaissance Italy and from there into modern bankers. Claiming to be “A Financial History of the World”, the book dutifully dabbles in societies, such as the Inca, who did not see gold and silver as money, and in the pre-Christian Mesopotamian clay tablets that served as credit notes for commodities. It may be that Mr Ferguson was too distracted by the present to pay enough attention to the past. His story of what is happening today shows prescience, even if it is necessarily incomplete. And yet, he is at his strongest in his reading of the news. Finishing his manuscript in May this year, Mr Ferguson must have been dizzy with the unravelling of certainties. As the debacle has unfolded, from a housing crisis, to a credit bust, a bank run and what now looks ominously like a global recession, each episode has posed different questions.
Perhaps the book was bound to be flawed, given the pace with which today's crisis has torn through the markets. But in the earlier chapters-the history, oddly enough, where you would expect Mr Ferguson's ambitions for his subject to quicken his judgments-the words rarely come to life, either as a source of ideas or as narrative.
It has strengths, including a tidy account of the run-up in housing markets and of the symbiotic rivalry between America and China. This rushed, uneven book, by a British-born Harvard University professor who made his name a decade ago with a history of the Rothschild banking dynasty, will contribute less than expected to that debate.
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