War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt - Kwasi Kwarteng (epub)

“One strength is in the lucidity of Kwarteng’s narrative style. War and Gold manages to sweeten the abstruse parts of his monetary history with anecdotes about the major actors.… Kwarteng has a flair for the elegant turn of phrase.”—New York Times Book Review

"War and Gold is a chronicle of fiscal ruination and redemption, with the emphasis on the former… Mr. Kwarteng, a heroic reader, has compiled a wonderful bibliography and gathered a colorful grouping of monetary characters to people his chapters.” —James Grant, Wall Street Journal

“This near-perfect volume appears with almost preternaturally perfect timing around the centenary of the beginning of World War I … War and Gold is a compelling successor to Liaquat Ahamed’s delightful and invaluable The Lords of Finance, awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in history. Kwarteng delivers up a successor volume worthy of such a prize. It extends Ahamed’s temporal framework by a factor of ten, to 500 years. Kwarteng, too, has compelling narrative virtuosity. His book is full of dramatic, charming, often wry vignettes of fascinating characters — heroes and villains, adventurers and knaves — spinning around, and off, the axis of the gold standard, in war and in peace.” Ralph Benko, Forbes.com

This carefully documented, scholarly, well-written work provides an account of the development of international financial institutions over the past five centuries…Overall, the book is a captivating narrative of monetary history that starts and ends with gold.” — CHOICE

“Absorbing… a fascinating, lucid and serious history of money, from the discovery of the wealth of the Americas to the present financial crisis.”—The Times (UK)