' 1873 : THE FIRST GREAT DEPRESSION ' : BOOK REVIEW SNIPPET

1873 : The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression - and the Making of The Modern World. By Liaquat Ahmed.

'' Prosperity that didn't help a lot of the globe '' : In the late 19th century, the world endured a phenomenon never seen before or since : a continuous fall in prices across the globe.

The long slide lasted for a quarter-century and was kicked off in 1873 by an international financial crash. Before the 1930s, this period of deflation, bankruptcy and instability was known as '' the Great Depression.''

But it was a strange kind of depression. By many indications, the economy took little time to recover.  Within a few years, trade increased, technology progressed rapidly, and real wages mostly rose. 

Cheaper food and fuel meant higher average living standards.

And yet inequality reached a peak that has only been surpassed in recent years. Large swaths of people were left behind when markets stabilized after the initial shock, fueling resentment that seeped into global politics for decades to come.

Some economic historians have concluded it wasn't much of a depression at all, and certainly not a great one.

In the popular imagination, the financial stagnation and resulting bitterness that festered across years of recovery have mostly faded from view.

Instead, we have focussed on the oil barons and industrialists who got unfathomably wealthy, bought art and built mansions, so we more often refer to those decades as the Gilded Age.

The former World Bank economist Liaquat Ahmed remedies that neglect in ''1873,'' a lively and compelling account of the initial crisis and ensuing turmoil.

It's a story that dives as far back as the closing stages of the first Industrial Revolution in the 1840s, and connects the consequences of Gilded Age inequality to the end of Reconstruction, the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of modern anti-semitism.

!WOW! thanks Trevor Jackson.