Devil Take the Hindmost

Edward Chancellor’s lively and authoritative classic study of speculation from early modern times to the present.

Sweeping, engaging, and perennially relevant, Devil Take the Hindmost traces the story of financial speculation back from ancient Rome to its revival in the modern world. Edward Chancellor takes a fine-tooth comb to the delirious days of tulipomania in 1630s Holland, “stockjobbing” in London’s Exchange Alley, and the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720—which prompted Sir Isaac Newton to comment, “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.”

From the Gilded Age and nineteenth-century railway mania to the Roaring Twenties and the crash of 1929, from junk bonds and the Japanese bubble economy to the day traders of the Information Age, Chancellor tells a fascinating story of human dreams and folly through the ages.