August 1, 2026
1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World
Liaquat Ahamed
We picked up Liaquat Ahamed’s 1873 after Satya Nadella cited it on a recent Microsoft earnings call, hoping it would help frame today’s AI build-out against the last historically large one—the railroads. It is only an okay book. The useful idea is that a historic railroad build-out, financed through the international bond market, collided with a shrinking money supply once the world abandoned silver for gold. That is the part that still rhymes with AI: the constraint may not be rails, compute, or power, but money.