Thomas McCraw has a flair for words and a keen understanding of the crucial role that financial markets play in economic development—characteristics that render this book a pleasurable read. After a few introductory remarks, McCraw divides his subject matter into three parts, 14 chapters (about 170 pages) on Alexander Hamilton, 13 chapters (about 150 pages) on Albert Gallatin, and 4 chapters (about 40 pages) on their “legacies.”

Although they break no new scholarly ground, the first two parts are welcomed additions to the literature. Not enough has been written about Gallatin, America's longest serving treasury secretary and the only one, besides Hamilton, to have his statue grace the outside of the Treasury Building in Washington, DC. Both treatments are longer and meatier than the respective chapter-length studies in Financial Founding Fathers (Robert E. Wright and David J. Cowen, Chicago University Press, 2006) and more financially astute and focused than most recent book-length biographies, including Ron Chernow's magisterial but analytically weak Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). The exquisite writing and extensive references to most of the latest financial history research render McCraw's effort a worthy addition to both library and personal collections.

Part III, however, presents some difficulties. Chapter 28, “Immigrant Exceptionalism?” is particularly problematic. In it, McCraw argues that America's most important early financiers were “immigrants.” It is true that Hamilton, Gallatin, Robert Morris (the “financier” of the American Revolution), Haym Salomon (an important early broker), William Duer (an infamous speculator and treasury official), Stephen Girard (private banker), John Jacob Astor (multifaceted capitalist), Joseph Nourse (longtime treasury register), David Parish (proto-investment banker), George W. Campbell (treasury secretary), and Alexander James Dallas (treasury secretary), were all born outside of the area that became the United States. But Hamilton, Morris, Duer, Nourse, Campbell, and Dallas all hailed from within the British Empire and came to mainland North America when they were young and before independence was won. They were all Americans in the sense that they were all native English speakers and eligible for the presidency. The others in McCraw's list are easier to consider “immigrants” because they were born outside the British Empire and first spoke French, German, or other Continental tongues.

Even conceding those born in the British Empire to McCraw, I believe it possible “to construct a roster of native-born Americans of that time who could match these … immigrants in their expertise at large-scale finance—or their importance to the solvency and prosperity of the national government” (p. 338). I submit that Oliver Wolcott (treasury secretary, born in Connecticut), Benjamin Franklin (a monetary theorist among other things, born in Boston), William Crawford (treasury secretary, born in Virginia), and the Philadelphia-area born Thomas Willing (president of the Bank of North America and later the first Bank of the United States), Tench Coxe (assistant treasury secretary under Hamilton and political economist), Michael Hillegas (longtime U.S. treasurer), David Rittenhouse (longtime treasurer of Pennsylvania and first director of the U.S. Mint), William Bingham (capitalist and author of the Bank of North America's bylaws), Nicholas Biddle (president of the second Bank of the United States), and Clement Biddle (important early broker) would stack up against everyone in McCraw's list except Hamilton and Gallatin. That said, I remain unconvinced that immigrant status, however defined, is a particularly enlightening variable. What really made early U.S. bankers, brokers, and financial policymakers exceptional—different in skills and outlook from their agrarian-minded contemporaries—was the nature of their education (e.g., Willing's and Dallas's in Britain) and their cosmopolitan mercantile (e.g., Coxe and Clement Biddle) or diplomatic (e.g., Franklin and Nicholas Biddle in Paris and London) experiences. Chapter 29, “Comparisons and Contingencies,” makes pedantic historiographical claims and then asserts, in pop philosopher of history style, that the course of U.S. history was not inevitable. At just seven pages, Chapter 30, “Capitalism and Credit,” is grossly underdeveloped. The final chapter, “The Political Economy of Hamilton and Gallatin,” serves as a sort of conclusion. Here McCraw astutely notes that both Hamilton and Gallatin supported a version of a “capitalist” economy wherein governments at all levels—city, county, state, and national—made frequent but uncoordinated interventions in “mostly free markets” (p. 357). The early U.S. economy thrived because U.S. governments were neither laissez-faire nor interventionist but rather advocates of entrepreneurship in general, not promoters of specific enterprises. Instead of wrapping up with the suggestion that current U.S. governments refill that early prescription for robust economic growth, however, McCraw finishes the book by returning to the dubious immigrant conceit.

In sum, scholars and lay readers alike should peruse this book's excellent mid-length biographies of Hamilton and Gallatin but they should not give too much credence to Part III.