Ian Klaus's Forging Capitalism is an intellectual and cultural history of modern finance capitalism focused on the interrelationship between trust and fraud in Britain between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the start of World War I. The double meaning of Klaus's title conveys the book's main argument: that capitalism's creativity and innovation is historically inseparable from—and often generated by—myriad schemes and deceptions that amounted to a “tax for creative capitalism” (p. 5). Klaus's study illuminates “the darker, criminal side of exchange . . . the history of that other capitalism: the one described by Dickens and Trollope, composed of agents, clerks, speculators, jobbers, brokers, lords on the take, knights on the make” (p. 25).

The broad outlines of Klaus's narrative will be familiar to historians of business and capitalism in the nineteenth century: as the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and technological change linked far-flung actors, information, and capital into global networks of exchange, traditional and local mechanisms for risk assessment (e.g., trust, reputation) proved inadequate and were supplanted by standardized, bureaucratized, and quantitative tools for risk management (e.g., insurance, credit rating, commodity futures trading). Within that context, Forging Capitalism's original scholarly contribution lies in its biographical dimension and its incisive analyses of how the legal system, markets, and print culture struggled to distribute and comprehend risk in an increasingly complex and abstract world of commercial exchange.

Forging Capitalism's three sections (“Status and Virtue,” “Reputation,” and “Verification”) trace a shift in standards for trust whereby “[t]he social exchange upon which trust was built became a process watched over by experts” (p. 155). Klaus illustrates the emergence, by the late nineteenth century, of an “Age of Verification” in which risk assessment came to rely less exclusively on individual judgment and increasingly on systematized and detail-oriented processes of inspection. (“Sherlock Holmes,” Klaus asserts, “was the great literary hero of the Age of Verification” [p. 156].) Individual chapters narrate a series of episodes: a hoax on the London Stock Exchange in 1814; a scheme defrauding investors in the settlement of Poyais, on the Mosquito Coast, in the 1820s; counterfeiting of exchequer bills in the 1840s; embezzlement at London's Globe Insurance Company at midcentury; the Financial Times's stock puffery involving the Gold Rae Mining Company in the 1880s; and fraudulent bills of lading in the transatlantic cotton trade in the early twentieth century. Klaus recounts the exploits of a vividly drawn cast of characters—including Lord Thomas Cochrane, clerk and theater owner William Watts, and financial journalist Harry Marks, among others—and then examines the ensuing trials, both in the legal system and in the court of public opinion, convincingly demonstrating that each fraud had not only economic consequences but also social and cultural implications.

What was really at stake in these deceptions was the nature of nineteenth-century capitalism itself, which Klaus variously characterizes as “creative,” “expansionist,” “expeditionary,” “survival-of-the-fittest,” and “criminal” (pp. 5, 76, 90, 135, 199). Klaus emphasizes, as have historians of commodity exchange and nineteenth-century market culture, that the rhetorical boundaries between “moral commerce and vicious commerce,” gambling and speculation, and capitalism and fraud collapsed in practice and shifted over time as moral discourses on the economy came to legitimize speculation by the turn of the twentieth century (p. 98). This book echoes recent histories of capitalism, particularly in the U.S. context, that have shifted fraud from the margins of ostensibly shadow or underground economies to the center.

Forging Capitalism is well framed, imaginatively researched, and engagingly written. To uncover the frauds who sought to conceal their activities, Klaus skillfully weaves together archival material from both sides of the Atlantic, government reports and legal proceedings, and a wealth of published primary sources including pamphlets and newspapers, classic economic treatises by Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter, and novels by Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

One of the book's most appealing features—its compelling narratives of individual fraudsters and their crimes—also invites further analysis of the institutions and infrastructures in which these actors operated. Klaus notes that “process and procedure . . . became the centerpieces around which state institutions and commercial organizations promoted and automated trust,” but he might have considered more fully the practices of verification in specific chapters (e.g., medical examinations in the life insurance industry, business forecasts in the Financial News, and regulations for cotton exchange), perhaps exploring how racial and scientific ideologies shaped life insurance, how the Financial News gathered and aggregated financial and market reports from around the world into advice for investors, or how participants in cotton exchange produced the quantitative knowledge that moved markets (p. 156). As historians of capitalism and science have shown, this ostensibly objective market information that Klaus identifies as central to the “Age of Verification” is itself a contested form of knowledge production around which trust has historically been constructed. Also, although Klaus focuses on the unmasking of these frauds in courts of law and public discourse, readers may wish for a more specific account of the economic and regulatory shifts they set in motion, beyond the author's concluding generalizations about the twentieth century as an age of economic reform on both sides of the Atlantic.

In Forging Capitalism, Klaus succeeds admirably in weaving together a set of fascinating episodes into a compelling tale of “criminal capitalism” in which “[f]raud and forgery were everywhere in Britain's newspapers, novels, and courtrooms” (p. 229). Written with narrative flair and an eye for dramatic historical detail, this lively book will reward not only historians of business, capitalism, and modern Britain, but also a wider audience interested in the moral dimensions of finance capitalism and its lessons for the twenty-first century.