Table of Contents

Part 1 Spending and taxing: the rise and fall of the warfare state; "hateful taxes"; the commons and the castle -representation and administration. Part 2 Promises to pay: mountains of the moon - public debts; the money printers - default and debasement; of interest. Part 3 Economic politics: dead weights and tax-eaters - the social history of finance; the myth of the feelgood factor; the Silverbridge syndrome - electoral economics. Part 4 Global power: masters and plankton - financial globalization; golder fetters, paper chains - international monetary regimes; the American wave - demcoracy's flow and ebb; fractured unities; understretch - the limits of economic power; conclusion.

About the Author

Niall Ferguson is one of Britain's most renowned historians. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. His books include The House of Rothschild, Empire, The War of the World, The Ascent of Money, The Great Degeneration and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist. His many prizes include the Benjamin Franklin Prize for Public Service (2010), the Hayek Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012) and the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economic Journalism (2013).