Liaquat Ahamed with Rana Foroohar: The Roots of Economic Crisis and 1873

What if our current economy didn’t stem from Washington or Silicon Valley, but in the financial panic of 1873?

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lords of Finance Liaquat Ahamed discusses the first global economic collapse and the antisemitic conspiracy theories that it inspired with bestselling author and business journalist Rana Foroohar — an event whose aftershocks still feel strikingly familiar — and his new book, 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World.

Drawing on decades of work at the World Bank, in investment management, and as a celebrated economic historian, Liaquat Ahamed has a rare ability to see how periods of rapid globalization can tip into instability, and how policy decisions made under pressure can reverberate for generations.

Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, the world experienced an unprecedented economic boom due to the expansion of global bond markets — at the hub of which stood the Rothschilds, arguably the wealthiest banking family in history. When the bubble burst in 1873, the Rothschild's were viciously scapegoated as part of a wider hatred directed at “Jewish finance,” a strain of antisemitism that reverberated terribly infect the 20th century. With a storyteller’s instinct and an economist’s clarity, Ahamed brings the mechanics of economic crisis into focus — and the cultural aftermath that follows.

Moving fluidly between past and present, connecting the panic of 1873 to the fault lines of our own era — financial excess, political backlash, the enduring tension between global markets and national interests, and the roots of modern antisemitism — Ahamed sheds light on the forces that drive our culture as only a master storyteller can. Don’t miss an evening of uncommon insight and perspective about how history and economics converge to create the modern world.