The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World is a 2008 book by then-Harvard professor Niall Ferguson,[1] and an adapted television documentary for Channel 4 (UK) and PBS (US),[2] which in 2009 won an International Emmy Award.

The book deals with the rise of money as a trade form, and tracks its progression, development, and effects on society into the 21st Century.

Chapter one depicts the journey of Francisco Pizarro, a Spanish explorer, as an example of the establishment of gold and silver being used as currency.

This chapter primarily focuses on the creation of the joint-stock company, the popping of the Mississippi Bubble, the Great Depression, and the Enron Bankruptcy.

In the afterword, Ferguson compares finance to the idea of evolution and addresses the financial crisis that had recently occurred during the time of writing the book (now known as the Great Recession).

The book was adapted into a six-part television documentary with the new full title Ascent of Money: Boom and Bust for Channel 4 in the United Kingdom.

A newer, reorganized four-hour version with the original full title The Ascent of Money: The Financial History of the World was aired in July 2009 by PBS.

From Shylock's pound of flesh to the loan sharks of Glasgow, from the "promises to pay" on Babylonian clay tablets to the Medici banking system.

He draws telling parallels between the Great Recession and the 18th century Mississippi Bubble of Scottish financier John Law and the 2001 Enron bankruptcy.

Professor Ferguson travels to post-Katrina New Orleans to ask why the free market can't provide some of the adequate protection against catastrophe.

His quest for an answer takes him to the origins of modern insurance in the early 19th century and to the birth of the welfare state in post-war Japan.

An economic theory says that markets can't function without mortgages, because it's only by borrowing against their assets that entrepreneurs can get their businesses off the ground.

Niall Ferguson investigates the globalisation of the Western economy and the uncertain balance between the important component countries of China and the US.

Spain mined so much silver from South America (the Incan Empire) that silver started to lose value; “Money isn’t metal — it is trust inscribed.” Fibonacci’s “Liber Abaci” helped pave the way for Europe to convert from Roman numerals to Arabic numerals, especially because of business calculations and bookkeeping.

American Confederates developed cotton bonds to sell in England to fund their efforts in the Civil War.

However, it criticizes Ferguson's lack of "intellectual history of capital": "George Soros gets more attention than Adam Smith and at a time when we are facing what Eric Hobsbawm has called 'the greatest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s', with Das Kapital a bestseller in Germany, is it credible to devote more space to Goldman Sachs's Jim O'Neill than the works of Karl Marx?"