Millionaire: the Philanderer, Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Modern Finance (2024)

“On the death of France's most glorious king, Louis XIV, in 1715, few people benefited from the shift in power more than the intriguing financial genius from Edinburgh, John Law. Already notorious for killing a man in a duel and for acquiring a huge fortune from gambling, Law had proposed to the English monarch that a bank be established to issue paper money with the credit based on the value of land. But Queen Anne was not about to take advice from a gambler and felon. So, in exile in Paris, he convinced the bankrupt court of Louis XV of the value of his idea.
Law soon engineered the revival of the French economy and found himself one of the most powerful men in Europe. In August 1717, he founded the Mississippi Company, and the Court granted him the right to trade in France's vast territory in America. The shareholders in his new trading company made such enormous profits that the term "millionaire" was coined to describe them. Paris was soon in a frenzy of speculation, conspiracies, and insatiable consumption. Before this first boom-and-bust cycle was complete, markets throughout Europe crashed, the mob began calling for Law's head, and his visionary ideas about what money could do were abandoned and forgotten.
In Millionaire, Janet Gleeson lucidly reconstructs this epic drama where fortunes were made and lost, paupers grew rich, and lords fell into penury -- and a modern fiscal philosophy was born. Her enthralling tragicomic tale reveals two great characters: John Law, with his complex personality and inscrutable motives, and money itself, whose true nature even to this day remains elusive.

Amazon. com Review Given our modern-day obsession with stock speculation, our frenzied sprint toward pre-IPO investment, and our fascination with the creation of overnight wealth, Janet Gleeson's Millionaire is timely, to say the least. The story of John Law's life and legacy is nothing short of incredible, breath-catching drama.

Born into a Scottish family of Church clerics and goldsmiths in 1671, John Law grew up to exude little of the moral and much of the monetary influence in his blood. When, as a 23-year-old gambler and philandering playboy on the London scene, he killed a nobleman in a duel, he was thrown into prison and sentenced to death. After pursing legal channels of appeal and getting nowhere, he eventually escaped and began the life of a gambler-cum-aristocrat in exile. His uncanny knack at the card tables and renowned success with women earned him a dubious reputation within late seventeenth-century European social circles. But his equally outstanding mathematical skills and fascination with the mechanisms of credit also brought him to the attention of political leaders. After attempting to peddle his revolutionary scheme for creating a national bank that issued paper currency to officials in London, Scotland, Vienna, Turin, and elsewhere, Law finally convinced the war-impoverished French government to back his plan. The bank's success and the events that followed--Law's introduction of the "Mississippi scheme, " a wild exercise in capital procurement and share offering that spawned the greatest bull market in history and its drastic crash--make this book fascinating reading for anyone playing the markets today.

Gleeson writes with clarity and style on topics that are notoriously complex and potentially dry. Without dumbing down her subject matter, she elucidates the finer points of credit-based financial systems and stock markets in readable English, welcoming both finance aficionados and illiterates to Law's tale. In that regard, the book is similar to Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman , and though ostensibly a record of the rise and fall of one of the world's most infamous--and ultimately influential--financiers, it is a story of murder, lust, politics, wealth, and poverty and far more intriguing than most fare in its often prosaic category. Indeed, this book will leap off your business bookshelf faster than you can ask who wants to be a millionaire. -- S. Ketchum

From Publishers Weekly Gleeson's riveting biography of Law shows that market speculation was not invented with the advent of Internet startups, but has a history that goes at least as far back as the beginning of the 1700s, when Law's financial innovations made ordinary citizens rich beyond their wildest dreams. Born in Scotland, Law parlayed his talent for gambling into a substantial fortune that earned him entrance to the most prestigious courts of the early 18th century. With help from his friends in high places, he escaped from an English jail, where he had been sentenced to death for killing a man in a duel, and worked his way to France. Upon his arrival in Paris, Law met the nephew of King Louis XIV, Philippe, duc d'Orleans, who soon would assume the throne following the death of his uncle. As regent, d'Orleans was fac”