This seems, at first sight, a crude position - and a surprising one for Ferguson, of all people, to take. It may suggest a view of the financial realm as a world of its own, following its own scientific laws of development. In one of his earlier books, The Cash Nexus, Ferguson did in fact challenge the whole notion of economic determinism, powerfully demonstrating the primacy of politics (and of that special form of politics, war). In this book, too, he pays special attention to all the ways in which financial systems can fail to follow the iron laws of the theorists, because they depend, in the end, on the decisions of less-than-totally-rational human beings.

So, Ferguson is not, after all, the financial equivalent of a social Darwinist; economic and financial history does not follow scientific laws; the metaphor of evolution is just a metaphor. The biggest difference between his story and Darwin's is the one he emphasises most strongly of all: financial "evolution" happens mainly because of intelligent design - the designers being not only financiers themselves, but also governments and legislators. Again and again, it is the interaction between those two groups that lies at the heart of the story he tells.

This book is the accompaniment to a six-part TV series. Each programme, and thus each chapter, covers a different topic: the rise of banking; the emergence of bonds; the role of home ownership in the modern financial system; and so on. The range of subject-matters is wide - from Mesopotamian merchants to Goldman Sachs, from medieval Pisa to modern Detroit, from China to Peru - and every page has the Ferguson hallmarks of trenchant argument, telling detail and lucid explanation.

(Not every detail is correct, though. The Indonesian "factories" of the Dutch East India Company were nothing like factories in the modern sense; Pascal did not write a book called Ars cogitandi; Breslau was not Prussian before the 1740s; and the innovatory Swedish bank founded in 1656 was not the Royal Bank, but the one set up by a brilliant Jew from Riga, Johan Palmstruch, which was incidentally also the first European bank to issue paper notes. But these are minor.)