In the original dust jacket. Black cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. Generations of historians have shied away from the truth behind the cliche: money makes the world go around. In the same style and manner that made ‘The Pity of War’ an international bestseller, Niall Ferguson answers the big questions about finance and its crucial place in bringing happiness and despair, warfare and welfare, boom and crash to nations buffeted by the onward march of history. Starting in 1700 and ending today, ‘The Cash Nexus’ is a dazzling, powerful and controversial explanation of modern world history and the fundamental force that lurks behind it all. In our opinion this was a very under-rated book which has become of greater interest. 

Review: I think this was Niall Ferguson’s first book. His more recent books (e.g The Ascent of Money, and Civilization) show the skill he has developed at taking complex concepts and explaining them in a way that suits the general reader rather than the specialist student (no doubt helped by the need to create television scripts from the same material). Unfortunately this earlier work shows just how far he has come. If you’re not a student of economic history (I’m not) then you’ll probably find this hard going. Sometimes the book will explain the workings of a financial instrument reasonably well before discussing its impact on history but more often it won’t, so you’re left knowing that the issuing of “consols” for example had a particular effect on UK finance but it’s not explained why – and you’ll only get given a hazy idea of what “consols” actually are. I have – just about – enjoyed reading the book (over many weeks!) and found some of the arguments interesting and challenging. 

Sir Niall Campbell Ferguson, HonFRSE (born 18 April 1964) is a British-American historian who is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, New York University, a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, and a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. He was a visiting lecturer at the London School of Economics for the 2023/2024 academic year and at Tsinghua University in China from 2019 to 2020. He is a co-founder of the University of Austin.

Ferguson writes and lectures on international history, economic history, financial history, and the history of the British Empire and American imperialism. He holds positive views concerning the British Empire. In 2004, he was one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Ferguson has written and presented numerous television documentary series, including The Ascent of Money, which won an International Emmy Award for Best Documentary in 2009. In 2024, he was knighted by King Charles III for services to literature.

Ferguson has been a contributing editor for Bloomberg Television and a columnist for Newsweek. He began writing a semi-monthly column for Bloomberg Opinion in June 2020 and has also been a regular columnist at The Spectator and the Daily Mail. In 2021, he became a joint-founder of the new University of Austin. Since June 2024, he has been a bi-weekly columnist at The Free Press. Ferguson has also contributed articles to many journals including Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. He has been described as a conservative and called himself a supporter of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.