The Ascent of Money

Reviewed by Diario de un Inversor · UpdatedJune 13, 2026

Our review

«The Ascent of Money», published in 2008 by Niall Ferguson, is a financial history of humanity told with the narrative skill of a first-rank historian and the urgency of someone writing in the midst of a global financial crisis. Ferguson covers five millennia of financial history: the origins of money in Mesopotamia, Florentine Renaissance banking, the birth of bond markets in medieval Italy, the development of stock markets, the emergence of insurance and the welfare state, and finally the hedge funds and derivative instruments of the twenty-first century. The book has a narrative virtue uncommon in popular economics writing: it makes comprehensible how each financial innovation responded to a real need — financing wars, managing agricultural risks, mobilizing savings for industry — before generating its own distortions. The limitation most noted by academic critics is that Ferguson, as a historian, tends to privilege narrative over structural analysis, and that his interpretation of financial capitalism is broadly favorable, which colors his selection of examples. An excellent introduction to the history of money and finance for the general reader.

Key takeaways

• Every major financial innovation — bonds, equities, insurance, derivatives — emerged to solve a concrete problem of risk management or savings mobilization.
• The history of financial crises shows that market collapse is not an exceptional dysfunction but a recurring feature of financial capitalism.
• Sovereign bond markets emerged in thirteenth-century medieval Italy to finance wars between city-states: public finance and armed conflict have been inseparable from the beginning.
• Hedge funds and modern derivatives are, in Ferguson's framework, the latest iteration of an unbroken chain of financial innovation that begins in Mesopotamia.

Fact

Niall Ferguson published «The Ascent of Money» in 2008, coinciding with the global financial crisis; the book was adapted as a four-part documentary by Channel 4 and PBS that same year.