Dariuz Wójcik, the lead author and project manager of the effort leading to this handsome volume, studied financial geography at Oxford and is now a professor of financial geography at Singapore’s National University. While at Oxford, he discovered that the famed Bodleian Library contained some two million maps and twenty thousand atlases. There were atlases of bells, beer, coffee, chocolate, monsters, and countries that did not exist, but alas, no atlas of finance. Atlases can be expensive to produce. Luckily, the EU provided funding for the 12,000 hours of research and illustrating that led to this volume, which Wójcik says is “dedicated to demystifying the world of finance” (p. 5).

The atlas is organized into eight chapters—History & Geography, Assets & Markets, Investors & Investments, Intermediation & Technology, Cities & Centers, Bubbles & Crises, Regulation & Governance, and Society & Environment. Each chapter contains ten topics, nearly all covered in just two pages, with a few paragraphs of text to develop the topic and original, colorful maps and graphics to illustrate it.

The result is a feast for the mind and the eye. It is not, however, a comprehensive portrayal of world of finance and how it developed over time. Instead, I would describe it as a well-stocked smorgasbord that provides the reader with a host of insights into what finance was, is, and perhaps even will be. Proponents of diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) and environmental, social, governance (ESG) initiatives will find numerous phrasings that support them.

A few examples may convey the volume’s approach.

Potosi, an isolated location high in the Andes (today in Bolivia) produced about half of the world’s silver output during the century after 1550, growing to become a city with a peak population of around one hundred fifty thousand. A striking graphic portrays the outflow of silver from Potosi, and the inflows of people, goods, technology, plagues, and religion from the rest of the world, with details in each of these categories. The text terms this “the first globalization.” Accompanying graphics include a map of trade routes, Potosi’s annual silver production from 1545 to 1820, and a Spanish peso de ocho coin minted there. One can only marvel at so much information packed into two pages.

Another two pages provide “candlestick charts” of the equity-market performance of advanced, emerging, and frontier economies, 2002–2021, and graphics showing the total capitalization and sectoral composition of stock markets in sixty-seven countries for 2021. The latter graphics are the same size for all these countries, but a comparison of the numbers indicates that the US market cap of $42 trillion exceeded that of all the others combined. Interestingly, the finance sector has a smaller share of total stock market capitalization in the USA than in most of the countries. Claims that the US economy has become disproportionately “financialized” may be exaggerated.

“The Safest Bets” topic provides a graphic of the investment returns and risks (measured by the volatility of returns) for stocks, bonds, and residential real estate in sixteen countries for the long period from 1870 to 2015. It confirms that stocks have higher returns and risks, and bonds have lower returns and risks. One might not have expected that houses have high returns and low risks. The Atlas’s advice is the following: “Getting on the property ladder makes a lot of financial sense” (p. 53).

One might read a book on “The Eurozone Crisis” of 2009–2012 without learning much more about it than the Atlas’s treatment of that topic in two pages. One graph shows the large spreads in sovereign interest rates between the Eurozone’s core and peripheral nations when each member nation had its own currency, before the advent of the euro in 1999. The single-currency euro reduced the currency risk of cross-border lending within the Eurozone; therefore, spreads narrowed dramatically. Peripheral nations (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain, labeled PIGS at the time) could borrow a lot more than before at lower rates, and they did. The loans financed imported goods and services from the core countries, so it seemed that every Eurozone member benefited. Another graphic shows how, by 2009–2010, PIGS borrowing led to huge current account imbalances; PIGS could not repay their debts to the core. Defaults caused interest rate spreads to widen to more than before the euro arrived. Bailouts ended the crisis, but after more than a decade, it seems the Eurozone still has not fully recovered.

Two pages on US dominance of global financial institutions—the IMF, the World Bank, the US Treasury, and the Federal Reserve—makes its point with a map of Washington, DC. The map indicates that from the White House, the Treasury is a 3-minute walk, while the World Bank and the IMF are 6 and 9 minutes away. The Federal Reserve is 12 minutes away, but the map locates the Fed’s headquarters at 19th and K Streets, which will be a surprise to Fed staff and others.

Atlas of Finance provides a unique and stimulating survey of the pervasiveness of finance in our world. Scholars will appreciate the thirty-three pages of detailed “Notes and References” on which the text, maps, and graphics are based.