Edward Chancellor is the author of Devil Takes the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation and the editor of Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle: A Money Manager’s Reports 2002–15. (April 2019)
John Law: A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century
by James Buchan
In 1694 a young Scotsman convicted of murder in London fled to the Continent. Two decades later he turned up in Paris, where he founded a national bank and headed a company that incorporated all of France’s overseas trading monopolies and absorbed the country’s entire national debt. The bank’s new …
