In the same breath, the chapter goes on to offer an overview of coinage since the seventh century BC. It then lays out with humor and verve the well-known story of Potos?, now a fairly sleepy town in the Bolivian Andes, which once provisioned Spain with untold amounts of silver. Titled ?Dreams of Avarice,? Chapter One sets course by recounting how the Incas were flabbergasted by the ?insatiable lust for gold and silver? that seemed to grip the Spanish conquistadors (p.

He is concerned with, inter alia, the ?recurrent hostility? to financial intermediaries and religious minorities associated with them in early-modern European history the triumph of the Dutch Republic over the Hapsburg Empire, the latter?s possession of silver mines in South America notwithstanding the spread of paper money, fiat currency and invisible means of payment in the twentieth century right through to the possible eclipse of American global primacy in the next two decades. These are many and varied, as one would expect. 1-17) prepares readers for what Ferguson perceptively identifies as the core stories attending the evolution of money over the last four millennia. Both the series and the book are immensely entertaining and readily accessible, but the latter arguably makes for a more convenient platform from which academics can approach Ferguson?s many insights. The book?s release coincided with an eponymous television series that has already been broadcast in much of the English-speaking world. In the Ascent of Money he harnesses his narrative skills to offer lay readership a captivating account of global monetary history from time immemorial to the twenty-first century. Harvard?s Niall Ferguson is perhaps best known for his magisterial history of the House of Rothschild and, more recently, his exhortation against the risks of unbridled government borrowing and nebulous stimulus packages ostensibly designed to avert what is often termed the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Niv Horesh, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales.

Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World Author(s):

The ascent of money book