Devil Take the Hindmost

Capitalism is a saga of booms and busts, and few tell the story with as much vim and rigor as the historian Edward Chancellor. Across centuries of hype cycles, Chancellor shows why entire cultures get sucked into brazen schemes promising riches and utopia.

Some of those schemes help facilitate the rise of genuinely revolutionary technologies, like the steam engine. And others go absolutely nowhere and end up destroying the lives of their many investors.