1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World

by Liaquat Ahamed

From the author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Lords of Finance, another magnificent and timely reckoning with the first truly global financial calamity through the prism of 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 borrowing through the global bond market, which provided financing for the century's most costly and transformative the railroad. At the hub of the bond market stood one family—the Rothschilds. With offices in London, Paris, Vienna, and Frankfurt, and through their agent August Belmont in New York, the Rothschilds were arguably the wealthiest and most powerful family in world history, possessing an unmatched ability to mobilize capital on a massive scale and wielding unparalleled political influence.

The boom predictably swelled into a series of bubbles that burst simultaneously in the early 1870s, cascading from one country to the next across Europe and the world. Governments of the major economic powers responded by blundering amid the tumult into a precipitous remaking of the global currency system—a move that not only exacerbated the ensuing economic collapse but set the stage for a prolonged twenty-year period of punitive deflation. This deflation sparked waves of populism and anti-globalization sentiment.

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 and Britain's takeover of Egypt. Ironically, as markets grew irrationally frenzied, the Rothschilds had presciently managed to protect themselves from the worst financial effects. Nevertheless, when the deluge came, they were viciously scapegoated everywhere as part of a wider spasm of  hatred directed at "Jewish finance," a strain of antisemitism that would come to full evil flower in Austria and Germany during the 20th century.

1873 is a marvelous birds-eye reckoning with the full dimension of the crisis, from its build-up to its long aftermath. Through the Rothschilds and a cast of other eyewitnesses, including Karl Marx and Mark Twain making cameos at crucial moments, we have witnesses on the ground to give us the human perspective. And we have a great and brilliant financial historian’s firm grasp of the larger forces at play to create a truly cohesive global narrative with thrilling explanatory power.

Genres: History, Economics, Nonfiction, Finance, Politics, American History, Business

368 pages, Hardcover

Published June 2, 2026

About the author

Liaquat Ahamed has been a professional investment manager for 25 years. He has worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and the New York based partnership of Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, where he served as Chief Executive.

He is currently an advisor to several hedge fund groups, including the Rock Creek Group and the Rohatyn Group, is a director of Aspen Insurance Co., and is on the board of Trustees of the Brookings Institution. He has degrees in economics from Harvard and Cambridge Universities.

Reviews

[Blaine DeSantis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely informative and easy to read book about the first great depression and the resulting collapses of businesses, banks, brokerages and how they effected rich and poor alike. Very easy to read and if you asked why it happened, as Alan Greenspan said "irrational exuberance." Everyone wanted to get rich, and there were conmen and get rich quick schemes galore. Couple that with monetary policies either tied to gold, silver or bimetalism and you has a recipe for disaster. Very well done!

[Lauren Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

An information, easy to read book describing what we in the US know as the Panic of 1873 but as the author effectively shows here, was a global financial crisis with an impact on the rest of the nineteenth century and beyond. Recommend for those who read 1929 and are into economic history in general. Thanks to Penguin Press and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review an ARC of this book.

[Janine · Rating 5 out of 5]

An examination of a global financial crisis and how it connects the inequality of the Gilded Age to the end of Reconstruction to the decline of the Ottoman Empire and to the rise of global antisemitism.

The crash of 1873 came out of boom years produced by events that included the discovery of gold in California in 1848, the rapid building of railroads in the 1850s-1860s, the accumulated debt from the Civil War, the reparations France had to pay Germany after the end of the Franco-Prussian War. People had more money to invest in risky things like projects in Egypt and Turkey for example. Fake projects and shady promoters appeared and as money went out and people used margins to gain wealth the banking bubbles eventually burst. At the same time instead of sticking with silver as the money standard, countries moved to gold which contributed to destabilization. When Grant vetoed a stimulus bill along with a series of scandals in his cabinet the way was paved for the shady election of Rutherford B. Hayes that resulted in the premature end of Reconstruction.

The book’s main focus though are the Rothschilds, the wealthy European Jewish banker family, who financed much of Europe’s growth and expansion during its Gilded Age. They did much to stabilize economies. Yet these efforts lead to the conspiracy theories of the day that it was the Jewish bankers who had shafted the counties of Austria and Germany. The term antisemitism arises in 1880. Such were the Rothschilds so reviled that in 1890 when a loan from them would have helped America, William Jennings Bryan had a clerk read from The Merchant of Venice.

While our current government crooks wax eloquently about returning to the Gilded Age (which had its fair share of corrupt politicians and millionaires), this book dispels its mystique. Money is a corrupter and greed is its willing ally. The look into the lead up of 1873 has some eerie correlations to today.

I gave this book five stars because it was well researched and written. It also presented information that shows how economies are global and provided interesting historical information many of us are not aware of. As with all history, and most importantly, it must strive to tell the truth and not what we want to hear because it fits our way of thinking - this book meets that important test.

[History Today]

Financial panics are endlessly fascinating. From ‘Tulip Mania’ in the Netherlands in the 17th century to the global financial crisis of 2008, the regular booms and busts of market economies have been analysed, celebrated, or regretted. They have always defied rational explanation, exactly because, in the words of Alan Greenspan of the US Federal Reserve Board, they demonstrate ‘irrational exuberance’. That accurately describes today’s boom in artificial intelligence, with far larger investment in data centres than can possibly be justified. We are in the midst of a boom and everyone is waiting for the bust. As always, the speculators hope that this time is different. It never is.

Liaquat Ahamed, a former investment manager, is the author of the much praised Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World and Precipitated the Crash of 1929, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2010. His new book discusses the stock market crash of 1873, which started with a property boom and slump in Vienna which spread to Berlin, New York, Paris, and London. As in his previous book, Ahamed’s focus is on the men who fostered the market’s exuberance, sometimes through fraud, usually from over-optimism, occasionally from an uncanny ability to forecast the future. There are enjoyable pen portraits of many of them and of the rulers and politicians who borrowed their money.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Roderick Floud is the author of An Economic History of the English Garden (Penguin, 2020).

[Joann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never in my life did I dream I would so enjoy a book about economics but this one had me hooked from the first page. The author brings together threads of so many countries, all joined by the economy which is so clearly explained and easy to digest. I was familiar with some of the history of this time but not the economics so am very glad to have come across this book.

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding book! Review to follow.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Crash Was Only the Beginning
“1873” Shows How Falling Prices, Harder Money, and Creditor Power Remade the Modern World
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 17th, 2026

Some financial crises end as events and continue as explanations. The exchange reopens. The failed house is itemized; the committee report arrives in the black suit of official explanation. Yet the damage keeps circulating – into prices, elections, creditor meetings, pamphlets, cabinet rooms, and conversations in which someone has begun to say that surely this was not an accident. “1873,” Liaquat Ahamed’s lucid, grave, and unnerving account of a panic that crossed borders at the speed of telegraphy, rumor, and frightened capital, is about one such damage. Its subject is not only a crash, but the season when prices kept falling after the panic had spent its noise, and when harder money, heavier debts, furious borrowers, enriched creditors, and scapegoats already waiting in the room taught voters, ministers, pamphleteers, and bankers how blame finds a route.

Ahamed returns 1873 from specialist memory to the larger argument over who gained, who paid, and who was blamed. Recovery is only the first door he opens. This is not quite a Rothschild family biography, though the Rothschilds move through the narrative with the static charge of a name everyone thinks they understand: half bank, half weather system. He traces the conversion by which coupons, railway bonds, sovereign loans, and coinage laws turn into tax levies, farms lost to debt, occupied treasuries, election bargains, and faces for losses too dispersed to see. A bond finances a railway. The railway promises future income. Under deflation, the same nominal debt grows heavier. Punishment, once it lasts long enough, starts hunting for a name.

The book opens in triumph, not fear. The late 1860s appear first as globalization in ceremonial dress: a golden spike in Utah, a Suez flotilla in Egypt, a rail junction in central India. The American transcontinental railroad is completed with national theater; the Suez Canal opens amid dignitaries, banquets, and that peculiar nineteenth-century confidence that history has arrived in dress uniform; the Bombay–Calcutta rail link suggests that even imperial distance can be compressed into a timetable. These are not opening ornaments. They establish the book’s essential doubleness: journeys are shrinking, ports are widening, rails are crossing continents – and much of the miracle has been bought on credit.

Behind the steel, steam, and ceremony stands the bond market, which Ahamed treats as the financial trestlework beneath the tracks and canals. Middle-class savings in London, Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt, and New York are gathered, packaged, marketed, and sent into railroads, mines, municipal works, and sovereign treasuries. Investors who distrust stocks after earlier manias prefer bonds because bonds seem sober, regular, almost safe as household furniture in their promise of income. The great joke, of course, is that sobriety can get drunk too. By the time Ahamed is finished with the 1850s and 1860s, the bond – usually literature’s least flirtatious prop – has become one of the most dangerous promises in modern history.

The Rothschilds are the filament Ahamed threads through the bourse, the ministry, the salon, and the creditors’ room. He traces the family from its Napoleonic ascent through its mid-century dominance of European government lending and into the third generation, when its members are bankers, patrons, social powers, and political intermediaries. He is careful about them in a way that saves the book from its subject’s ugliest trap. The Rothschilds are neither polished into saints of prudence nor cast as the sinister puppet masters of the fantasies that later attach to their name. They are powerful, secretive, immensely rich, and entrenched in the bond tables and cabinet rooms of the century. They are not omnipotent. “1873” knows the difference between creditor force and conspiracy, between the ability to demand payment and the old poison made modern by ledgers.

Confidence begins to slur. The Franco-Prussian War, the humiliating French indemnity, and the astonishing French loans arranged to pay Germany become the hinges of a new fever. France’s ability to raise enormous sums looks like a triumph of national credit and Rothschild prestige. Germany’s cash deluge heats the new empire’s markets. Berlin and Vienna begin to froth. Companies multiply, real estate rises, bank shares float upward on a cloud of self-congratulation, and respectable men discover, as respectable men periodically do, that what they used to despise as gambling becomes investment once they are doing it themselves.

The first floor gives way in Vienna. Then New York buckles, where Jay Cooke & Co., overextended by the Northern Pacific Railway, collapses and drags confidence down with it. Wall Street closes. Railway bonds sour. Panic reverses direction across the Atlantic. Europe, America, London credit, weak sovereign borrowers, Ottoman debt, Egyptian overreach – all get pulled into the weather system of credit. A lesser book might have treated this as the climax. Ahamed treats it as the clang heard above the boiler room.

His deeper argument begins with silver.

This is the book’s boldest wager. The most theatrical material lies in bankruptcies, suicides, palace coups, political bargains, financial scandals, and ruined speculators. Yet Ahamed insists that the damage that kept reopening was a fight over whether silver still counted as money. In the midst of panic, Germany moves away from silver and toward gold; other countries follow; the United States quietly demonetizes silver through legislation later denounced as the “Crime of 1873.” Less money is now available against more debt. Prices fall. Debts grow heavier in real terms. A lender’s paper strengthens while a farmer’s crop buys less relief. Creditors gain without seeming to act. Debtors feel punished by arithmetic with the manners of destiny.

Ahamed’s account bites hardest here because he does not make monetary policy falsely glamorous. He makes it historically dangerous. His prose is lucid, patient, cumulative. It moves from event to mechanism, from mechanism to consequence, from consequence to mood. He is not a pyrotechnic stylist; anyone coming to nineteenth-century bimetallism for verbal fireworks may need air, water, and a chair near the exit. But the steadiness is the style. He writes about mania without imitating mania. He writes about panic without losing proportion. The prose has a banker’s virtue in a historian’s hand: it keeps the accounts clear without pretending the accounts are innocent.

The design looks simple until it starts doing work. Boom, euphoria, bust, aftermath: the four-part architecture appears almost classical until one recognizes where the weight falls. “The Aftermath” is not a mopping-up operation. It is the room where the book finally shows its hand. Ahamed’s crucial claim is that the crisis of 1873 matters less as a single market break than as a redistribution written in ledgers, tax rolls, crop prices, unpaid coupons, and public debts. Deflation squeezes farmers, planters, miners, artisans, governments, and heavily indebted societies. It rewards creditors, bondholders, and rentiers. In the United States, economic distress and political fracture help set the stage for the disputed election of 1876, the bargain that gives Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency, the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, and the premature end of Reconstruction. In Egypt, debt becomes a route to foreign control and eventual British occupation. In the Ottoman Empire, default leads to fiscal subordination and the erosion of sovereignty. In central Europe, ruined investors and aggrieved citizens increasingly direct their anger toward Jews, turning financial confusion into antisemitic blame.

Here “1873” becomes darker and more original. Ahamed’s great subject is not simply capitalism’s instability, but the moment when loss starts drafting accusations. Finance is hard to see: coupons, loans, exchange rates, gold and silver reserves, all technical, distant, and unevenly understood. Its chains of causation are long; its benefits are unevenly distributed; its injuries often arrive late. When it fails, the desire for explanation can sour into the desire for accusation. The Rothschilds, precisely because they are both genuinely powerful and mythically inflated, become the perfect test case. Their name can mean bank capital in one paragraph and fantasy in the next. Ahamed’s handling of antisemitism is especially strong because it refuses two equal errors: it neither minimizes actual creditor power nor indulges the myth that such power explains everything.

The most useful comparisons are books that treat money not as background plumbing, but as the device by which power, pain, and blame are distributed. “1873” has some of the monetary rigor of Barry Eichengreen’s “Golden Fetters,” some of the dynastic financial sweep of Niall Ferguson’s “The House of Rothschild: The World’s Banker, 1849–1999,” and some of the nineteenth-century system-building ambition of Eric Hobsbawm’s “The Age of Capital: 1848–1875.” But Ahamed is finally doing something distinct from all three. He is writing the history of a crisis that changes the pressure in every pipe of the system: how capital moved, tightened, broke, and then reappeared as politics under other names.

The book’s achievement is to make the panic’s consequences feel neither accidental nor fated, but legible only after the damage has spread from exchange floor to farm, treasury, polling place, and pamphlet. Public memory likes handles: a date, a closed door, a ruined man, a day assigned its funereal color. Ahamed is more interested in the longer, less photogenic damage – the afterlife of crop prices, public debts, and creditor claims. Falling prices do not make for easy drama. They do not arrive with a pistol and a cape. Yet in “1873,” deflation becomes one of the great engines of modern bitterness. It changes who owes what, who gains without seeming to, who feels cheated by the rules, who turns against free trade, who demands softer money, who suspects the system has been captured, and who begins to imagine a hidden hand.

The cost of this command is compression. Ahamed has chosen the mapmaker’s authority over the street-level walk. He gives us memorable figures – Jay Cooke, Alphonse de Rothschild, Alfred de Rothschild, Ismail Pasha, Abdülaziz, Grant, Disraeli – but the book’s deepest loyalty is to the machinery connecting them. Ruined farmers, Egyptian taxpayers, Ottoman subjects, Black Americans abandoned to the counterrevolution after Reconstruction, and small investors wrecked by speculation all appear with force, yet often as pressure points in a larger structure rather than as sustained human presences. This is not a collapse of craft. It is the tradeoff of altitude. The view is extraordinary, but one occasionally wants to hear more from the street below.

There is also a small tension between the subtitle’s large promise and the book’s own admirable nuance. The phrase “the First Great Depression” promises a clean comparison to later depressions, while Ahamed’s argument is more refined: the immediate downturn after 1873 was not uniformly catastrophic by later standards, and the older label has been challenged by economic historians. The deeper wound was not simply recession. It was deflation, monetary contraction, creditor advantage, and political afterlife. The book is better than the bluntness of its hook. Its own intelligence complicates the signboard above the door.

Still, that complication is part of the pleasure. Ahamed does not force the past into a tidy lesson for the present, though the present keeps leaning into the frame with the impatience of a person trying to be noticed at a crowded lecture. Real-estate bubbles, sovereign debt, financial contagion, anti-globalist anger, protectionism, conspiracy theories, and the suspicion that hidden financiers must be pulling history’s levers – all of this feels recognizable. But the book explains resemblance without forcing equivalence. It does not say that then is now. It shows something more useful: when systems become abstract enough, their failures generate myths simple enough to hate.

At Brussels in 1892, the knot tightens one last time. Alfred de Rothschild appears as a banker trying to coax silver into stability, proposing a limited plan to support its price. The conference fails. The silver question remains unresolved. The United States moves toward the Panic of 1893 and the fierce politics of free silver. J. P. Morgan and the Rothschilds later help arrange a bond issue to stabilize American gold reserves, a rescue that restores confidence while feeding precisely the suspicions of banker power that Ahamed has been tracing all along. The ending refuses closure because the crisis itself has refused to remain an event. It has become a vocabulary: gold, silver, creditor, debtor, foreigner, banker, Jew, people, nation, conspiracy, rescue.

That ending also sharpens the book’s portrait of the Rothschilds. They remain powerful, but power is not control. They can underwrite loans, influence markets, advise governments, and represent a whole age’s idea of financial authority. They cannot make silver behave, stop panic from recurring, or prevent their own name from being distorted into a traveling emblem of grievance. Ahamed’s Rothschilds are most interesting not when they dominate history, but when history makes them too large in the imagination and not large enough in fact.

For me, “1873” lands at 91/100, which under my rubric translates to a Goodreads-compatible 5/5 stars: not a claim that the book is flawless, but a recognition of its steady prose, lucid design, moral restraint, and ability to make the aftermath read as the plot, not the footnote.

Ahamed has written a book about a crash, but the crash is not the final subject. The final subject is the long work of consequence. Money builds the railways, opens the canals, finances the palaces, steadies the governments, flatters the savers, tempts the speculators, and then, when confidence fails, changes costume. It becomes debt, then grievance, then accusation, then memory. In “1873,” the modern world is not only made by what capital constructs. It is made by what happens when the coupon still exists but the world behind it has changed – when prices fall, promises harden, and the injured turn from the ledger toward the crowd, trying to turn arithmetic into an enemy.

[Benjamin Giese · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book on the shelf at an airport bookstore, not realizing it hadn’t been officially released yet. Amazing read, though. Succinct; enrapturing; laymen and industry folks alike will find a fascinating and thorough journey through a rarely told history.

[Rachel Childers · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those of us who couldn't get enough of Ahamed's combination of compelling narrative prose and sweeping historical perspective integrating financial, economic, and political history through the lens of the major players in economics and finance in his earlier "Lords of Finance" on the Great Depression, this book is a must-read. The Panic of 1873 is a less well-known and arguably somewhat world-shaking event, but the narrative here is still compelling, and a strong case is made for its central role in the history of the era. The story starts with the major banks of the time, centers their role in geopolitics and the ongoing industrial revolution, then describes the speculative boom in Germany, Austria, and the US, and the subsequent crash, then covers the long dénouement afterwards including the end of Reconstruction in the US, debt crises which destabilized Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, and the subsequent long deflation and interminable battles over currency that led to the "classical" gold standard. Along the way we get many entertaining stories of the various rogues and mountebanks who took advantage on the way up and found their comeuppance on the way down, as well as family squabbles among the Rothschilds that tightly track, due to their role as the major financiers of sovereign debt, the economic and political conflicts of their respective base countries. The discussion of the consequences afterwards is a little pat; while certainly contributing to the rise of Jim Crow in the US via the election of 1876, antisemitism in Central Europe due to the prominent role of Jewish bankers and businesspeople during the bubble years, and European imperialism in the Middle East through the debt crises, all of these are larger stories of which the economic element was one part. The discussion of ultimate consequences is treated with interest befitting that given at the time, explaining the rise of the gold standard and the debates about bimetallism that modern readers of 19th century history often find abstruse, as a major issue of international adjustment and economic management, though this is more told than shown. Readers of "Lords of Finance," which focused on the challenges created by the 19th century gold standard in the chaotic years between the two world wars and during the Great Depression, but references to this latter history are kept minimal, obscuring the direct importance. Since the actual economic contraction post 1873 was relatively small, and the subsequent deflation, while substantial, coincided with a period of strong global productivity growth and arguably the rise and spread of global industrialization, the medium-term impact of the monetary decisions of the era seems rather mixed, muddying the idea that 1873 was something like a trial run for the 1929 Great Depression.

Overall, while the drama was less intense and the book a little less focused than his previous magnum opus, this remains both a cracking read that's hard to put down, and one of the most comprehensive global economic histories of an important but under-appreciated era, so I would still recommend this highly to both the casual and committed economic history buff.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would rate this 3 1/2 stars. It was an interesting book, but it was also rather dry. I had very little prior knowledge of the crisis of 1873, or how it contributed to the decline of the Ottoman Empire, or what led to the failure of reconstruction after the Civil War or the British takeover of Egypt so this was all new to me.

I was unaware that in the late 1800s, there were countries that based their currency on silver, others on gold, and others based their currency on bimetallism (both silver and gold). After the discovery of the Comstock Lode in NV in 1869, there was a fight between those in the US who favored basing our currency on silver and those who favored basing our currency on gold.

The premier banking family of Europe, the Rothschilds, were able to insulate themselves from the most severe consequences of the banking crisis of the 1870s while others suffered severe losses. While the Rothschilds made efforts to help stabilize international currency, they were scapegoated throughout the world and were subjected to vicious antisemitism. In a chapter called “The Jews Themselves Are to Blame” Berlin 1874-1876, Ahamed chronicles the rise of antisemitism in Europe that many years later, formed the foundation of the rise of the Nazis in Germany.

The section on the presidential election of 1876 was very interesting. One of the most prominent issues during the 1876 election was Reconstruction. Both parties accepted that after more than a decade of federal involvement in the south after the Civil War, the nation (including the north) had become tired of Reconstruction and wanted to scale back Washington’s involvement in the south. The presidential election between Samuel Tilden (D) and Rutherford B Hayes (R) was a very close one with significant evidence of fraud. For example, in South Carolina, the number of votes cast was greater than the number of adult males in the state. Women did not yet have the right to vote at the time. The tight election included fraud on both sides and was finally decided by one electoral vote for Hayes with many questioning what was seen as an unprincipled deal. Within months, troops were withdrawn from the south and Reconstruction ended. Southern Democrats began what became known as the Jim Crow laws which governed life in the south for nearly a century.

Bottom line: There is a LOT more to this book than I mentioned here. It was an interesting book, but it read too much like a textbook.

[Anthony Caporale · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I had never read this book, would I ever be given the chance to learn about a collapse in the speculative railroad bond market in 1873, triggering a global financial crisis and a decade long depression?

Probably not.

The stories of scams and fraud in this era make meme-coin rug pulls look like child’s play. By far the most intriguing detail of this book is that people haven’t changed at all. People find deceitful avenues to get rich. When times are tough, people and media look for scapegoats within minority groups. There are people that expertly foresee the disaster waiting to happen during booms and bubbles, and there are people who dive headlong into the hype of money making.

A couple of other reviews mention not understanding the financial details in this book. I would like to say: do not fret, because no one understood what was happening in 1873 either!

This quote sums up the era’s comprehension on finance pretty well. It is a synopsis of “expert” testimony taken during a U.S. House committee meeting, theorizing the cause of the bond crash and the subsequent economic depression:

“the list included reckless legislation by Congress, extravagant living, too much education, the countrywide spread of mental illness, the over issuance of free passes by the railroads, the failure to grant women to vote, or conversely, the fact that women were stealing jobs from men.”

Though I should mention that there are some authors and writers who seem to understand the system and its mechanics incredibly well decades before any monetary theory on liquidity or central banks were invented.

If you are interested in history and want to experience this time period in a different way, this book is for you.

The author is so-so on explaining the finance aspect. Certain parts should go more in-depth of the financial mechanics since I am sure we are not even scratching the surface on some things. You will definitely not become an expert in macroeconomics or finance after reading this book, but man does it tell a good story.

I would also highly recommend Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “1929”, as it also scratches this historical-finance itch I have.

[Josh Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent history of the crash of 1873, its origins and repercussions. It's also surprisingly entertaining - Ahamed has a keen ear for a quotable line and manages to make what might otherwise be a rather dull topic fascinating.

A few of the lines that stuck with me:
* “It is not terribly difficult to identify a bubble; what is difficult is to know when it will burst.” -Liaquat Ahamed
* "Things take much longer to happen than you imagine. And once they happen, they happen much quicker." -Ahamed (might be a direct quote from Rudi Dornbusch)
* "Everyone speculated and - for a time - everyone speculated successfully." - Henry Adams
* “Millionaires in America make corners as though they had nothing to lose. As if it were only an expensive game. An Englishman fears poverty excessively, and a Frenchman shoots himself to avoid it. But an American with a million will speculate to win ten, and if he loses take a clerkship without thinking much about it. The peculiarity makes them the most dangerous business gamesters in the world.” -The London Spectator
- This quote ^ is actually from a decade after the crash - 1884 - but it points to a trait that many people throughout the 19th century commented on. I wonder if the same could be said today. In the century and a half since the English and French have both built extensive welfare states that provide a social safety net while the U.S. hasn't. In theory one might expect that this would make Americans more risk averse, but it's not clear that's happened.

This was also an era of great and evocative insults:
* Karl Marx referred to the prominent French politician Adolph Thiers as “that monstrous gnome [who] has charmed the French bourgeoisie for almost half a century, because he is the most consummate intellectual expression of their own class corruption.”
* An unnamed observer described Jay Gould as a “bearded little ferret.”
* I'm actually not sure if this is an insult, but The New York Herald described Gould and his partner as “The great gorilla of Wall Street; the gold goblin Gould and the amphibious financial Orangutang otherwise known to naturalists and the world at large as the irrepressible Jim Fisk Jr.”

Oh to be an amphibious financial Orangutang.

[Brendan (History Nerds United) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ugh, I hate finance. I did love 1873 by Liaquat Ahamed, though! It turns out that our global financial system went ahead and crashed a whole bunch of times and is constantly teetering over the abyss. Doesn't that make you feel awesome?!

More specifically, in 1873, the markets decided to crash. There were a lot of similarities with the Great Depression, but a few key differences. First of all, America was not the end-all, be-all of money in the world. Yes, that used to be the case. We are just a baby nation after all. (Kid History Nerd really loved that last sentence. I'm keeping it in.) Instead, Europe was in charge when things went horribly wrong. As far as similarities, this depressing episode was also at the tail end of a period of awesome money-making that everyone deluded themselves into thinking it would never end. Fun fact: It always ends.

For those folks who read Andrew Ross Sorkin's 1929, you'll love this one, too. Ahamed has to do a bit more world building since he is going further back in time, but like Sorkin, he tells this story through the people at the center of it. This includes the Rothschilds, robber barons, and a monarch or two. And thank God, because like I said, I hate finance. This choice in storytelling makes it much easier to understand the cause and effect while allowing Ahamed to drop some hilarious anecdotes as well. However, if you are a finance geek, Ahamed does get into some of the backroom discussions and how things worked at this time. Are you a gold or silver believer? Yes, this was a huge question back in the day. Personally, I am a "Why not both?" kind of person.

In summary, a finance book that is also for us non-finance folks. Give it a read.

(This book was provided as an advance reader copy by Penguin Press.)

[Writemoves · Rating 4 out of 5]

I confess that I did not find this book "as easy to read "as many other Goodread reviewers have commented. I wish I understood a bit more about European history and economics prior to reading this book. That being said, it is very well written and very well researched. So any limitations regarding understanding the content is pretty much solely on me.

I was not aware of the 1873 depression and its effect on the global economy. I found the sections on the Rothschilds very interesting as I was not aware of their history or their influence and control of various economies. I did get an understanding of the enmity between France and Germany. After France, lost the war, they were forced to pay a very high reparation. I guess what goes around comes around as Germany wound up paying huge reparations in 1918 after the conclusion of World War I.

This story is about greedy people, usually rich people, trying to get wealthier. They used inside information, bribes, and other means of coercion to get what they wanted. And the people who suffered the most? The poor and those who were easily fooled by the "irrational exuberance" of 1873.

One can make the parallels between the exposures to railroad bonds back in 1873 to current investment exposures to AI currently.

The author provides a variety of interesting anecdotes and stories about many of the influential people during this period, particularly their financial motivations.

Antisemitism was rampant during this period, particularly in Europe. The reader gains an understanding on how this rose and permeates through today.

[Matthew Gibb · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a stinker of a book. Starting at about chapter 5: The Greatest Financial Transaction in History, the author began to lose me. In such a brief chapter he talks about the Crimean War,The Franco-Hungarian War and the Seven Weeks War. I went back and took careful notes,as this was the audio version. I asked chatgpt a few questions and it improved my ability to understand this complex story. I slogged on to discover many chapters rattling off political nonsense, which had my attention flagging. The things about the backing of money with either gold,silver or bi-metalism all held my attention. America's choice to go with a gold standard along with vast improvements in efficiency and speed led to deflation. The politicians never did the right things and although a great deal is talked about the Rothchilds family early on the author seems to think there wasnt a conspiracy to defraud the general public. These people were inbred and exclusively men. They spread themselves out into five countries. They used railway bonds to swindle the public. The one great takeaway is the hype that went with the railway boom will likely be similar to the present AI. In particular Predictive AI, which may take decades to be viable. I'd never read another book by this author. Since I paid for it I was duty bound to finish it,by chapter five my enthusiasm for this booked faded.

[Yoda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very Geared Towards Individuals and not Macroeconomics

Any review of this book would have to emphasize that it is more akin to Andrew Sorkin’s book “1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History – and How it Shattered a Nation” instead of Charles Kindleberger’s “The World in Depression 1929-1939”. In other words the book’s narrative is much more focused on individuals than on macroeconomics. This, in turn, is centered on the Rothschild family. There is a mentioning of important factors causing and prolonging the depression (i.e., crash in liquidity stemming from overspeculation in the bonds for railroads, bimetallism, gold’s role in reducing liquidity, etc.) but there is definitely no in-depth discussion or analysis of these factor’s roles in the crash. In other words it is not written for economists in mind but, instead, those interested in a general non-economic history of the period. Hence, for those interested in the economic causes of the depression and its aftermath, the book would only rate a two star but for those interested more in a general history of the period, a four star.

[Jamilah Green | Apothecary Tales Press · Rating 4 out of 5]

1873 is a thoroughly researched, detailed examination of the global influence and financial grip of the Rothschild family. Growing up, I learned mostly about the 1929 crash and the Great Depression, but Ahamed makes it clear that the patterns of greed, corruption, and wealth inequality repeat across eras and 1873 was no exception.

The writing is engaging and accessible, even as Ahamed unpacks complex economic concepts. At times I found myself pausing to look up terms to ensure I fully understood them, but the effort was worth it. Readers with a baseline understanding of economics will get more out of this work, though it remains a solid, relatable history read for anyone interested in financial crises and their consequences.

ARC received from publisher via NetGalley for my honest review.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. The subject is fascinating and I liked the biographical information. The tone of the writing was conversational, helped along by the great cartoons, and I thought that Ahamed did a reasonable job of keeping the information comprehensible for a lay audience. Although the name Rothschilds is in the title, the book really encompasses a lot more than just this famous family. I also liked the way Ahamed addressed antisemitism, touching on it when appropriate but not overdoing it. Overall, the book was well worth reading. Thank you to Netgalley and The Penguin Press for the advance reader copy.

[Anshuman · Rating 4 out of 5]

1873 is a compelling read. It’s a whirlwind tour through Europe, Turkey, Egypt, and the United States that focuses on some lesser-known participants in monetary history. Though the central focus is the crash of 1873, Liaquat Ahamed does a great job of conjuring portraits of the famous names of the time, including the Rothschild family, Jay Cooke, Barings, and Jay Gould. Even though this is a short book, it’s packed with information and names, some of which start to run together. This is only a minor stumbling block, though. Overall, it’s a breezy read and highly recommended.

Thanks to Penguin Press and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Iang95ify .]

Tells the story of the 1873 market crash which took the German and Austrian stock market, and the factors that led up to it like the reparations from the 1870 German-France war. Details how the Rothschilds and Barings (less so) came to dominate the bond markets as the world became more globalized through the railroads in America and opening of Suez Canal. More salacious parts include how the Ottoman sultan and Egyptian khedive overstretched as they borrowed from British creditors to support their vanities. Discussion about gold standard, silver standard and bimetallism could be made more simply, which could wash over readers.

[Linds · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was an informative book and relatively easy to get through, it just felt a little distracted to me. There didn’t seem to be any particular pathway to follow. We went continuously forward and backward in time, and journeyed to and fro between locations. And while the Rothschilds had played a significant part in the beginning, they fell often to the backdrop instead of being continuously tied to the point. Overall, while I enjoyed it well enough, I was left feeling a bit disjointed.

Thank you Penguin Press for the early digital copy!

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never would have guessed that I would find a book about banking to be this interesting. Really, much of it about the switch to the gold standard and the consequent limiting of the money supply, leading to 25 years of deflation. Many people made miserable by this, with enormous political implications. Very much like today: enormous concentrations of wealth, popular frustration, high partisanship, high turnout, races won or lost by a hairsbreadth,.. Well, we got out of it last time, maybe we can get out of it this time.

[Dennis Hogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World by Liaquat Ahamed. Ahamed is an international banker, businessman and writer. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lords of Finance. 1873 is a detailed look at the world wide financial crisis of the 1870’s with a look at local events and wars that impacted the economic picture. Ahamed lays the blame upon mismanagement and wrong headed currency decisions by nearly every head of state.

[Mike Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished at GBay. Solid overview of a global depression that I was mostly unaware of. Similar to 1929, the downturn was caused by the mania that preceded it and the failure of central bankers to provide liquidity when it was needed. The book discusses the importance of the newly global private debt funding a revolutionary technology (railroads) as a driver of the preceding mania. Hopefully the current private-debt fueled AI build out isn’t history repeating.

[Faith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not the right audience for this book, since I am bored by economic theory. I was lured into reading it by the reference in the title to the Rothschilds. The book covers a lot of territory and I did learn things from it, however I wish that it had been condensed into a magazine article. I am sure others will enjoy it more. 3.5 stars

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Detailed examination of a global financial downturn in 1873. Worth reading if only to see that we’ve learned nothing over the years. Speculation and weak government regulation combined to throw the global economy into a deep recession if not depression. Wealthy people and bankers ended up OK; regular people not so much. And, of course, everyone blamed the Jews. Same shit, different date.

[Robert L Svensson · Rating 4 out of 5]

For someone with decent knowledge of late 19th and early 20th century political history Ahamed brings a – at least for me – new perspective on how the growth of the international bond market and the crash of 1873 fueled the political undercurrents that would shape the early 20th century, not least antisemitism.

[Ell, Ess Jaeva · Rating 1 out of 5]

50%. blah blah blah... the name is related to wealth, I wasnt sure why I knew it but was interested to learn how/why. you get the gist in the 1st 10% of the book... then a lot of loosely related multi-generational slop that branched

[Alexander B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being written by a non-historian, it definitely suffers from some lack of fact-checking (e.g. there was no Ferris wheel in Vienna in 1870), but it’s nevertheless a very good look at a cross section of western society at the time of the first major financial crash.

[Lottie C · Rating 5 out of 5]

5⭐️

Very interesting exploration of the creation of modern wealth and power