So, you thought the French Revolution came about after liberals were inspired by the American independence movement and the call for ‘Liberty, Equality & Fraternity’?
Wrong! That defining moment in Western liberalism came about with the bursting of what was possibly the world’s first stock market bubble!
So you thought that the Renaissance was brought about after those returning from the Crusades brought back with them the knowledge about humanist art forms and long-lost treatises on science and medicine?
Wrong again! The Renaissance was literally bankrolled by the House of Medici, the world’s first recorded banking family, who sponsored most of the stupendous artworks that enthral us to this day. The Medici applied Oriental mathematics to money, which created the basis of their vast fortune.
While quoting Karl Marx might not be fashionable today, few will find his concept of the economy being the base of the social superstructure hard to refute. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson tweaks this notion into his own words when he says: “Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret”.
Ferguson’s book, ‘The Ascent of Money’, ranks, I believe, in the realm of modern non-fiction classics, to be talked about in the same breath as Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and Samuel Huntingdon’s Clash of Civilisations in the past few decades.
In this book you will find Ferguson explaining how the Dutch Republic prevailed over the Habsburg Empire because ‘having the world’s first modern stock market was financially preferable to having the world’s biggest silver mine’. And that ‘It was Nathan Rothschild as much as the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo’. Almost all major historical events have been thus tied to one single cause — money.
In today’s world, where stock markets are crumbling, pensioners witnessing erosion of their income as interest rates decline in the name of ‘stimulus’, it becomes all the more important for all of us to be financially aware and literate. To know about past follies can lead us to take better decisions in future, at least, we hope. Ferguson’s ‘The Ascent of Money’ is one of the best starting points of that experience.
