The modern stock market, B. Mark Smith’s new book makes clear, is only one component of a much broader “equity culture”—a lively and complex international market involving stocks, bonds, mutual funds; joint stock and limited liability corporations; and trading in grain, gold, diamonds, and currency.
The Equity Culture is the story of how that market came about—from shippingmagnates banding together in eighteenth-century India to the railroad robber barons of nineteenth-century America to currency traders such as George Soros. Smith’s spirited and colorful telling makes two points especially clear: that the equity culture has always been international, with globalization as merely its current phase; and that the equity culture is often surprisingly self-adjusting, with “manias, panics, and crashes” making possible ever greater risk and innovation.