The world was wild for gold. After discovering the Americas, and under pressure to defend their vast dominion, the Habsburgs of Spain promoted gold and silver exploration in the New World with ruthless urgency. But, the great influx of wealth brought home by plundering conquistadors couldn't compensate for the Spanish government's extraordinary military spending, which would eventually bankrupt the country multiple times over and lead to the demise of the great empire. Gold became synonymous with financial dependability, and following the devastating chaos of World War I, the gold standard came to express the order of the free market system. Warfare in pursuit of wealth required borrowing -- a quickly compulsive dependency for many governments. And when people lost confidence in the promissory notes and paper currencies issued during wartime, governments again turned to gold. In this captivating historical study, Kwarteng exposes a pattern of war-waging and financial debt -- bedmates like April and taxes that go back hundreds of years, from the French Revolution to the emergence of modern-day China. His evidence is as rich and colorful as it is sweeping. And it starts and ends with gold.

The War on Gold is a definitive study of the past, present, and future of the metal that Keynesian economists and political schemers have denounced as a barbarous relic. The war on gold began several centuries ago, when politicians discovered they could print limitless amounts of paper currency for a small fraction of the cost of using gold as money. It has accelerated in recent years...as the U.S. acquired paper debt, deficits, which led to double-dip inflation, and internationalists plotted to create a new world order.

Presents a history of England from the departure of Roman forces in 450 A.D. to the Norman invasion of 1066, focusing on the gold and silver artifacts of the Staffordshire Hoard found in 2009 to highlight the events and art of the period.

SOUTHERN AFRICA was once regarded as a worthless jumble of British colonies, Boer republics, and African chiefdoms, a troublesome region of little interest to the outside world. But then prospectors chanced upon the world's richest deposits of diamonds and gold, setting off a titanic struggle between the British and the Boers for control of the region. It culminated in the costliest, bloodiest, and most humiliating war that Britain had waged in nearly a century, and left the Boer republics devastated. In this gripping history of the turbulent years leading up to the founding of the modern state of South Africa in 1910, Martin Meredith portrays the great wealth and raw power, the deceit, corruption, and racism that lay behind Britain's empire-building in southern Africa. Diamonds, Gold, and War is a tale of high adventure, high fi nance, and high politics that also shows the massive impact of white expansion on indigenous African societies. And it explains the rise of the virulent Afrikaner nationalism that eventually took hold, with repercussions lasting nearly a century.

A young Civil War soldier discovers a cache of gold in the Shenandoah Valley.

Social sciences.