100 Books Like Travellers' Money

I love the way this book makes the very old story of the French Revolution new and exciting by telling the parallel story of how so much of the turmoil of that period was etched onto the money that a succession of governments issued.

I learned so much, both from the shifting set of images on French money and the wonderful stories about how a confused populace used this money to the best of their ability, as their paper currency lost both the crowned heads that once adorned it and, in the process, much of its value. Spang ingeniously recounts the revolutionaries’ efforts to paper over a failing revolution with vacuous promises to pay. 

Before Valenze published this book, she had mostly written about people—religious visionaries, working-class women, and the like. Since this book appeared in 2006, she has focused on things—specifically milk and, as seen through the eyes of Thomas Malthus, the food that sustains populations.

This book is where these two foci meet, and the book has deeply informed my own work on money and the way I teach British history to my students. My main takeaway from the book is Valenze’s claim that Britain “detoxified” money toward the end of the eighteenth century. Around this time, moralists found cause to focus on its redemptive capacity and shifted their chagrin from money itself to its abuse. Money, she argues, became a measure of status, a judicial incentive (in the form of rewards for wanted criminals), and a vehicle of philanthropy–emerging, alongside the Enlightenment, as “a universal instrument of personal agency.”

When I got wind of this book, I had just finished writing a book about gold and money in Britain from the 1750s to the 1850s. Although I knew about the long history of British money prior to the 1750s and also about its complicated history down to the present, I jumped at the chance to read the whole story laid out between two covers. Blaazer deftly accomplishes this task, with a special focus on the strikingly different paths that money took in Britain’s three corners of Ireland, Scotland, and England (not so much on Wales, as is so often the case in such histories!).

How a country manages its money, it turns out, says much about how it governs its people—ranging from willful indifference in Ireland to consistent policies in England and Scotland that favored the wealthy (and especially the bankers) over the middling classes. A final advantage of… show more.

Although this book is ostensibly about risk, none of Levy’s fascinating case studies stray far from money. Indeed, one of his central claims is that modern capitalism transforms risk into a financial calculation, whereby money’s fluid nature can be employed to divert uncertainty in different directions. Although the goal in such transactions is always to contain risk, the reality (as brilliantly recounted by Levy) is far less certain.

I read this book immediately after writing about the history of British life insurance, and most of these cases (about insuring slave ships, African-American savings, farm mortgages, and the stock market, among others) reinforced the lessons I had learned about the Quixotic and hubristic nature of risk management. The upshot of the book is that, over the course of America’s long nineteenth century, the rich got richer, and the poor got empty promises. Its brilliance lies in the relish with which Levy… show more.

This book came by recommendation from Jonathan Siegel, the brains and brawn behind Xenon Partners, a private equity firm that I joined in 2018. This book summarizes several profit models presented by a fictional mentor coaching a business executive. It’s clever, poignant, and was helpful to me in thinking about other profitable business models. For example, in my side-hustle life, I use the Profit-Multiplier Model: running multiple small SaaS businesses in parallel using the same tech stack (make money off the same good or skill in different markets).

There’s nothing I like better than an underdog story, especially one about business. This book deconstructs several underdog stories. In it, Jim McKelvey, co-founder of Square, shares what he believes is the key to building a resilient, world-changing company: a strategy he calls the Innovation Stack. 

From a glassblower who lost a sale because he couldn’t accept American Express to taking on the credit card industry (and Amazon), it’s a thrilling story told brilliantly, and I found it to be bursting with business lessons. I loved the irreverent first-person look inside Square, but the narrative is so much bigger than the story of Square. Thank you, Tim McKelvey, for reminding me to listen to the entrepreneur inside.

I fell in love with Ireland on a trip there in 2003 and have been there many times since. As a result, I have read many books by Irish writers, including O’Faolain’s memoirs.

I picked up the story of the woman known as Chicago May with no expectations but was immediately drawn in by the way O’Faolain connected her life with May’s, and individual history with national—both Irish and American—history.

I admire how the author imbued a biographical investigation with the pacing of a novel and a larger-than-life main character. 

Monks and Minow are the founders of modern shareholder-focused corporate governance. As such, their book is required reading for understanding how shareholders have taken back control of publicly listed companies, not only in the USA but also around the world. This is a book with a purpose, and it shows in the writing—the authors use detailed case histories, often from their own personal experience to show that corporations and business in general stand to benefit from more active shareholders.

A star business has market leadership of a niche, where the niche is itself growing fast. This is arguably close to a tautology, but it is also quite a rare thing to find.

This book is about how to spot these star businesses at an early stage, and the enormous returns which can flow from doing so. Much of my wealth has come from doing this a few times (probably largely by luck).

It also makes interesting suggestions about how to create and manage a star business, albeit this is not something that I’ve ever tried myself.

I’d known – from some of my early Wall Street Journal work – that Soros was a philosophy student in London before he embarked on the Wall Street pursuits that made him a billionaire. This operates on a higher mental plane than 99% of what’s written about Wall Street. It’s packed with philosophical riffs that are not easy to crack. And yet, it’s a sincere effort by Soros to explain his vast, enduring hedge-fund success. You have to be in the right mood to accept his challenge. If so, I found it made for an excellent series of evening quests as I worked through the text, slowly turning bewilderment into insights.