This virtuous journey is presented to the reader in a barely concealed TV-script format, with all the tropes that discipline demands: the notion of secret discovery ('Behind every great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret') the importance of journey ('Read this book and you will understand why. It is a story of relentless progress that might not be wholly obvious to today's HBOS shareholders and Icelandic bank savers. Booms and busts are products of our emotional volatility.' And, barring the odd fluctuation, finance has, like Man, in Ferguson's account at least, ascended in good, Whiggish fashion 'unquestionably upwards'. 'Money amplifies our tendency to overreact, to swing from exuberance when things are going well to deep depression when they go wrong. With typical bravado, the thesis is modelled on Jacob Bronowski's masterful series, The Ascent of Man, with Ferguson positioning financial markets as 'the mirror of mankind', magnifying back to us our values, weaknesses and psychoses. The Ascent of Money is an account of 'moolah' from the Incas to the credit crunch and, with it, an argument for the centrality of finance to all elements of human history.

As Jay explains: 'A book may make more demands on its reader and, in return, the reader may expect more matter from the author.' It is not a deal on which Ferguson delivers. 'Both have their own demanding disciplines and imperatives and neither can be made successfully as an image of the other.' While TV glories in the concrete and struggles with the abstract, written history can embrace both. 'A book is a book and a television series is a set of television programmes,' wrote Peter Jay in Road to Riches. This truth was best acknowledged by a TV book on the same subject as Ferguson's series. But books and television scripts are not the same.

His new work, The Ascent of Money, written 10 years later, is an altogether different beast.įrom its opening sentence - 'Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, readies, the wherewithal: call it what you like, money matters' - you know this is a TV tie-in. It's called The House of Rothschild: The World's Banker 1849-1998.

N iall Ferguson has written a brilliant book exploring the historic nexus between money, diplomacy, warfare and globalisation.

The ascent of money book