This book is an interesting collection of chapters pertaining to investing over the past two thousand years written by two accomplished and well-respected investment professionals. It would be of keen interest to advanced undergraduate students and graduate students, as well as to academics and practitioners with an interest in investment, fund management, history, and financial analysis and regulation. The empirical focus in most of the chapters provides the reader with lessons learned from different periods in history—from a variety of countries in the early years, and shifting to the United States for more modern history—thereby providing insights for future scholarly work as well as for practitioners and policymakers in facilitating investment.

This book is organized into nine chapters, plus a concluding chapter. Chapters 1 and 2 are truly historical and provide a context for understanding the origins of modern institutions of investment. Chapter 1 starts with a unique and insightful history that begins with investment in ancient Greece and Rome and the role of religion and usury rules. Chapter 2 continues this historical overview up to the Industrial Revolution and the formation of joint-stock companies and stock markets. Chapters 3 through 9 offer a more modern history of investment. Chapter 3 provides a historical perspective on pension funds and retirement funding. Chapter 4 discusses mutual funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations, and life insurance. Also, the chapter provides an overview of investments in the great recession and an introduction to the postwar era. Chapter 5 covers the topics of fraud, market manipulation, and insider trading. Chapter 6 discusses cyclicality and financial crises. Chapter 7 offers a historical overview of investment theory. Chapter 8 discusses new forms of investment, including hedge funds, private equity, and venture capital. Chapter 9 provides some recent information on the role of financial innovation in generating new elites in terms of extreme wealth. The book concludes with a short, forward-looking chapter on investment in the twenty-first century and what history can teach us about the future.

Overall, I think the book is excellent and covers a tremendous amount of ground on investment history. In fact, I could spend all of this review praising the book. But instead, it may be more helpful to guide the reader in terms of things that could have been included but perhaps were not for reasons of space and focus.

I would have liked to see some more data on the number of publicly traded companies over time in the United States and the rest of the world. There have been some drastic changes in recent U.S. history, for example, with the number of publicly traded companies peaking in 1997 and falling by about 50 percent over the next twenty years. These changes were due partly to the introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 and the Dodd-Frank Act in 2012. The book could have discussed more some of the connections between regulation and investment and how regulation shapes investment opportunities; for example, I did not find a discussion of Sarbanes-Oxley legislation in the book. Some discussion of shifts in investment opportunities to other countries might have been interesting as well. There is indeed a home bias in the way we look at investments in practice, and more information on the evolving recent history of investment opportunities in other parts of the world would have been helpful for many readers.

In the discussion of alternative investments, I would have liked to see private debt funds addressed alongside private equity. Also, it would have been useful to mention collateralized debt obligations, securitization, and products related to the financial crisis. New developments in crowdfunding and the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act in the United States would have been interesting as well.

There are a few minor points to mention. In the scandals discussed in chapter 5, the major ones are not in chronological order—perhaps it is fun to begin with Bernie Madoff, but I would have appreciated a historical look at the evolving nature of scandals in a book on the history of investment. And some discussion of the financial crisis misses some key dates, such as the first week of August 2007 when markets went “haywire.” Many identify that as the time when folks really understood that the crisis had begun.

Finally, I think it would be useful to discuss further the historical intersection between (a) political connections and investment and (b) politics and financial regulation. These topics seem to have become extremely important in the era of President Trump.

A large number of closely related topics would have been worthy to include in the book, but are likely missing for reasons of space. Nevertheless, despite this one unavoidable limitation, overall each of the chapters included in this book provides great insights. The authors have organized the book in a terrific way that offers the reader insightful analyses on each of the topics considered. Everyone with an interest in the past and future of investments should have a copy of this book.