Liaquat Ahamed — 1873: The Rothschilds and the First Great Depression
Financial historian Liaquat Ahamed and journalist Steven Weisman examine the 1873 global financial collapse — the first truly worldwide economic crisis and a template for every one that followed.
Why we picked this
Ahamed's Pulitzer-winning 'Lords of Finance' made the 1929 crash comprehensible to a general audience — he brings the same gift for economic narrative to an earlier crisis that shaped everything that came after.
Liaquat Ahamed, whose Lords of Finance won the Pulitzer Prize for its account of the four central bankers who inadvertently caused the Great Depression, turns his attention to an earlier and less-examined catastrophe: the financial collapse of 1873, which devastated economies from Vienna to New York and set in motion years of deflation, unemployment, and political instability across the industrialized world. 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression uses the Rothschild banking dynasty as a lens through which to understand how interconnected financial systems can amplify and transmit shocks.
Steven R. Weisman, a former New York Times foreign correspondent and now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, joins as moderator. Weisman’s own work on the history of US tax policy and economic nationalism gives him the background to push Ahamed on the contemporary resonances of 1873 — a year when protectionism surged and international economic cooperation collapsed.
The parallels to current conditions are not labored but unavoidable. Ahamed is the kind of economic historian who makes these connections visible without being reductive about them, and this promises to be one of the more intellectually nourishing evenings of the spring season.