The World's Banker 1849-1999

Ferguson shows us a neural network of another sort: the web of offshore finance and international co-investment that culminated in the First World War—not at Sarajevo but in the Middle East, where Great Britain and Germany faced off over railroad access to Britain’s prize possession, India. Wrapped in the thoroughly engaging family history of the far-flung Rothschilds and how they knit themselves together in an empire of their own, Ferguson embeds an equally enthralling history of what he calls “Globalization I,” the 19th-century race to connect the empires established in the preceding age of exploration with their European centers of… show more.