Why You'll Love This
The word 'millionaire' had to be invented for the people John Law made rich — right before he destroyed them.
- Great if you want: financial history told through a genuinely stranger-than-fiction life
- The experience: brisk and propulsive — reads more like biography thriller than dry history
- The writing: Gleeson keeps the economics accessible without dumbing down the intrigue
- Skip if: you want deep economic analysis — the focus stays on the man, not the mechanics
About This Book
John Law was a convicted killer, compulsive gambler, and serial seducer who somehow became the most powerful financier in Europe—and in the process accidentally coined the word "millionaire." His scheme to replace gold with paper money and turn a bankrupt France into a speculative frenzy was audacious, visionary, and catastrophically fragile. Janet Gleeson's biography follows this Scottish exile from the dueling grounds of London to the corridors of Versailles, tracing how one man's ideas about money, credit, and confidence transformed economies—and nearly destroyed them—nearly three centuries before modern financial crises made such lessons painfully familiar.
What makes Gleeson's account so rewarding is her instinct for narrative momentum. She writes with the pace of a thriller without sacrificing historical rigor, keeping Law's personal contradictions—brilliant and reckless, persuasive and delusional—at the center of every scene. The result is a book that works simultaneously as biography, financial history, and portrait of an era intoxicated by new wealth. Readers who find economics dry will discover here that the invention of modern finance was anything but.