Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, during the first era of globalization, the world experienced an unprecedented economic boom. Fueling this expansion was an explosion in the global bond market, at the hub of which stood one family--the Rothschilds, arguably the wealthiest banking family in history. While the giant sums of capital provided through the bond market built the railroads, the century’s most transformative investments, the money raised also unleashed a frenzy of speculation, massive overinvestment, and wasteful borrowing by governments. With excessive euphoria leading to disappointed expectations, in the early 1870s the bubble burst. Stock markets from Vienna to New York crashed, and dozens of railroads and many governments defaulted. Financial officials responded by blundering into a precipitous remaking of the global currency system--exacerbating the ensuing economic collapse and setting the stage for decades of a punitive deflation that sparked waves of anti-globalist populism. As Liaquat Ahamed shows us in this enthralling history, the crisis of 1873 was, among other things, a death blow to Reconstruction in the United States and the proximate cause of the Ottoman Empire’s slow death spiral. Ironically, though the Rothschilds had presciently kept a low profile during the bubble, when the deluge came, they were viciously scapegoated as part of a wider hatred directed at “Jewish finance,” a strain of antisemitism that would come to full evil flower during the twentieth century. <1873< is a bird’s-eye reckoning with the full dimension of the crisis, from its buildup to its long aftermath. The Rothschilds and a cast of other witnesses give us the human perspective. And we have a brilliant financial historian’s grasp of the larger forces at play, resulting in a global narrative with thrilling explanatory power....

Autorentext
Liaquat Ahamed graduated with degrees in economics from Cambridge and Harvard, worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and had a twenty-five career as a professional investment manager based in London and New York before turning to writing. His first book, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, about the lead up to the 1929 Great Depression, won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award Gold Medal, and the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award. He is a trustee of Putnam Investments, an adviser to the RockCreek group, and the chair of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. He lives in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., with his wife, Meena.

Klappentext

**“A lively and compelling account . . . The cumulative effect is impressive. . . . Ahamed tells his story with an easy fluency and a high velocity.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Superb . . . Ahamed thrillingly brings back to life a boom not unlike today's . . . In the process, he illuminates new ways of thinking about finance.” —Financial Times

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Literary Hub

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lords of Finance, a magnificent and timely reckoning with the first truly global financial calamity and the famous banking family at the center of the whirlwind**

Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, during the first era of globalization, the world experienced an unprecedented economic boom. Fueling this expansion was an explosion in the global bond market, at the hub of which stood one family—the Rothschilds, arguably the wealthiest banking family in history. While the giant sums of capital provided through the bond market built the railroads, the century’s most transformative investments, the money raised also unleashed a frenzy of speculation, massive overinvestment, and wasteful borrowing by governments.

With excessive euphoria leading to disappointed expectations, in the early 1870s the bubble burst. Stock markets from Vienna to New York crashed, and dozens of railroads and many governments defaulted. Financial officials responded by blundering into a precipitous remaking of the global currency system—exacerbating the ensuing economic collapse and setting the stage for decades of a punitive deflation that sparked waves of anti-globalist populism. As Liaquat Ahamed shows us in this enthralling history, the crisis of 1873 was, among other things, a death blow to Reconstruction in the United States and the proximate cause of the Ottoman Empire’s slow death spiral. Ironically, though the Rothschilds had presciently kept a low profile during the bubble, when the deluge came, they were viciously scapegoated as part of a wider hatred directed at “Jewish finance,” a strain of antisemitism that would come to full evil flower during the twentieth century.

1873 is a bird’s-eye reckoning with the full dimension of the crisis, from its buildup to its long aftermath. The Rothschilds and a cast of other witnesses give us the human perspective. And we have a brilliant financial historian’s grasp of the larger forces at play, resulting in a global narrative with thrilling explanatory power.

Leseprobe
1.
In Bonds We Trust
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As the 1860s ended, the world’s economy had never appeared in better shape. Few events were more emblematic of its health than the successful completion, within a few months of one an-other, of three monumental and iconic infrastructure projects that promised to remake global commerce.

On May 10, 1869, several hundred luminaries and railroad workers gathered on the windswept plateau of Utah’s Promontory Summit, north of the Great Salt Lake. They were there to witness the linking of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads, marked by the ceremonial driving of an eighteen‑karat gold spike into the tracks. The moment signaled the realization of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States, collapsing the New York–San Francisco journey from six months to a mere six days. It had taken seven years to build at an estimated cost of
$70 million.

Scarcely six months later, in November 1869, a more extravagant ceremony unfolded halfway around the world to mark the opening of the Suez Canal. It had cost $100 million. The celebration was a much grander affair. Three thousand European guests, including Empress Eugénie of France, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, Crown Prince Friedrich Wil-helm of Prussia, Prince Henry of the Netherlands, and Prince Louis of Hesse, were invited for the festivities, which lasted four days and came with a hefty price tag, said to have been $10 million. On the morning of November 17, 1869, a flotilla of forty‑eight ships, festooned with bunting and escorted by half a dozen Egyptian men‑of‑war, entered the canal at Port Said. At sunset, a northbound flotilla from Suez met them at Ismailia, the halfway point along the canal, where a new town featuring a palace, a hotel, and numerous villas had been built on the banks of Lake Timsah. There the guests enjoyed a sumptuous banquet—five hundred cooks had reportedly been imported from Trieste, Genoa, and Marseilles—followed by an elaborate fancy‑dress ball.

Four months later, on March 7, 1870, a more modest function took place at Jubbulpore (now Jabalpur), in central India, to mark the junction of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway with the East Indian Railway, thus linking Bombay on the west coast of India with Calcutta, fourteen hundred miles away on the east coast. Attendees included Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son; Lord Mayo, the British viceroy; Sir William Vesey‑FitzGerald, the governor of Bombay; and a collection of In…