The Ascent of Money

The Library Essay

Finance Built More Than It Broke

Niall Ferguson's financial history of the world, published in 2008 as the banking system shook, argues that the instruments everyone was cursing, credit, bonds, joint-stock companies, insurance, mortgages, are among civilisation's load-bearing inventions. He follows money from Mesopotamian clay through the Medici, the Dutch and the bond markets that funded empires, to the securitised housing finance then failing in real time.

Ferguson, then at Harvard, wrote it alongside a television series, and it carries the virtues of that origin, pace, story and a taste for the vivid case. The crises are all present, since finance advances by blowing itself up and rebuilding, but the through-line holds: poverty, not wealth, is the condition money's history rescued most people from.