American Fortune

Four hundred years ago, an English trading company planted a desperate colony on a river no one yet called American, and the first American fortune turned out to be a leaf that could be smoked. From the counting rooms of Boston merchants to Hamilton's bank and the cotton gin that made enslaved people the nation's largest asset, every great fortune was built inside a system of laws, banks, subsidies, and labor the titan did not create. The state was always the hidden partner in the machine.
American Fortune follows the machinery of money from the Virginia Company to the artificial intelligence economy in 4 movements: founding an industrial nation, making and unmaking fortunes, and building the consumer and digital economies. Readers meet Samuel Slater smuggling British mill designs, Morgan's first $1 billion corporation, the $5 day, Silicon Valley, and the crash of 2008. Every wave of technology creates a fortune, and every fortune provokes a backlash that shapes the next wave.
• The boom, mania, panic, and reform cycle from the canal era to 2008
• The battle over money, from Hamilton's bank to Jackson's veto to the Fed
• The plantation as a factory in the fields, and the price of the cotton fortune
• The railroad barons, the trusts, and the first antitrust movement
• The assembly line, the $5 day, and the middle class it built
• The New Deal settlement and half a century of stability
• Deregulation, Silicon Valley, and the second Gilded Age
This is a history with opinions, and every judgment is argued with evidence. It is for the reader who reads the headlines and wonders how the economy works: the entrepreneur, the investor, the worker, and the citizen. Refusing both the worship of tycoons and the reduction of everything to exploitation, it explains why every great fortune produces a great backlash and why the same system built the highest standard of living. The names change, and the machinery does not. This history is the best map for the next turn.