Solid Enough Primer. This is one of those “history of humanity” type books that attempts to take literally thousands of years of human history (including pre-history) and condense it into a sub-400 page narrative. (With 12% of its 403 Kindle pages being bibliography, which we’ll get to in a moment.) Human history being as complex as it actually is, none of these types of tales are going to be 100% correct in all details, as details are more often than not incredibly nuanced. But as an overall narrative, this one is at least interesting and provides a lot of solid jumping off points of “hey, did this particular bit of history *actually* happen the way McWilliams claims?”. Sometimes that answer will be “mostly”. Others, it will be “somewhat”, and still others will be “barely”. Different specialists will have different opinions at different points, and I know my friends trained more in the Austrian school of Economics (Milton Friedman, Ludwig Von Mises, Frederick Hayek, etc) will likely take quite a bit of umbrage with McWilliams’ 20th and 21st century histories in particular. Including the fact that McWilliams is obviously quite the fan of one John Maynard Keynes – the singular “economist” who has done more harm to the global economy than very likely any other in the history of humanity.
Still, like I said, as an overall primer on the history of money… this is at least entertaining and mostly informative… if you’re willing to do more research.
No, the actual star deduction isn’t for McWilliams’ adoration of Keynes or his at times gross over simplifications. Those can at least somewhat be excused as not 100% objective criticisms – even if they *are* educated criticisms. The actual star deduction here comes from the aforementioned 12% bibliography. Quite simply, a book with this much history should be cited *far* more than this, and indeed I’ve personally read books over the years covering a far more limited historical scope that had multiples of this level of documentation.
So read this book to begin to get a rough idea of the topic – and, as I’ve already pointed out to one friend and fellow book blogger since reading this, it *can* be enough to refute a few monetary policy memes/ stories floating around online. Then do even more research on the actual events portrayed here and see how accurate McWilliams truly was. Or was not.
Very much recommended.
This review of The History Of Money by David McWilliams was originally written on December 1, 2025.