Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now draws on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, which exposed atrocities in the Belgian Congo resulting from the rubber trade. In 1890, Conrad met Roger Casement, who later reported industrial-scale abuses upriver, including an infamous Belgian officer, Guillaume Van Kerckhoven, who displayed severed heads on stakes.

Around 1887, John Boyd Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire to smooth his son’s bicycle rides, and advances in vulcanization made rubber indispensable to industry. The 1890s bicycle boom transformed society. In England, parish records show more inter-village marriages as bicycles widened courtship. The bicycle became a symbol of women’s independence, provoking backlash—male Cambridge students even destroyed an effigy of a woman cyclist in 1897. Suffragists such as Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst joined Clarion Cycle Clubs to spread their message. Production rocketed: American factories went from 40,000 bikes in 1890 to 12 million by 1896, with 700 factories operating in Britain.

Demand for tires knitted together a global supply chain: Manchester activists, Coventry manufacturers, and Congo rubber gatherers were linked through London finance. Middle-class savers deposited funds that banks channeled into higher-yield colonial ventures. Between 1855 and 1900, European foreign investment tripled, and Britain channeled about 4% of annual GDP into overseas projects. At the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, King Leopold II claimed the Congo Free State as his personal domain. In 1892, he and British financier Colonel John Thomas North established the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber and Exploration Company to exploit Congo rubber.

The public company structure distanced investors from the brutality it financed. Between 1885 and 1908, an estimated 5 to 10 million Congolese died as the Force Publique imposed rubber quotas through whipping, burning, and execution. To track ammunition, soldiers needed to present a severed hand for each bullet, leading to baskets of smoked hands as “proof.” Shipping clerk E. D. Morel noticed that only guns and ammunition, not trade goods, went to the Congo.

As British consul, Casement documented the atrocities. Despite fearing exposure after Major General Hector MacDonald’s scandal and death by suicide, he traveled into the interior in 1903 and returned with a 60-page report. Meeting Morel that year, he helped found the Congo Reform Association. Casement was knighted, though Britain’s motives included protecting its Malayan rubber plantations and deflecting criticism of its conduct in the Boer War.

Later an Irish revolutionary, Casement sought German arms for the 1916 Easter Rising but was captured in Kerry. Tried for high treason in London, he faced a cabinet dilemma: Dead, he was a martyr; alive, a bargaining chip. Circulation of the Black Diaries, which purportedly detail encounters with other men, turned public opinion, and he was hanged at Pentonville on August 3, 1916. His anti-colonial message influenced leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister in 1947. The first era of globalization—money flows dictating colonial relationships—began to unravel. Casement’s family plot lies only yards from John Dunlop’s grave, a final coincidence that ties the tire that fed the rubber boom to the Congo campaign that cost Casement his life.

The film The Wizard of Oz functions as a political allegory about the late 19th-century Gold Standard. Oz evokes gold (as in “oz,” short for ounce), the Yellow Brick Road the standard itself, and Dorothy middle America. The Scarecrow stands for struggling Midwestern farmers, the Tin Man for industrial labor, and the Cowardly Lion for William Jennings Bryan, the Democrat-Populist candidate in 1896. The Emerald City’s compulsory green spectacles suggest viewing the world through money-colored lenses. In L. Frank Baum’s novel, Dorothy’s silver shoes (changed to ruby in the film) symbolize the proposed addition of silver to the money supply—the solution always at her feet.

In 1873, after the California gold rush, America bound the dollar to gold despite fears of deflation in a rapidly growing economy. Because gold’s supply was relatively fixed, prices tended to fall as output rose, benefiting gold holders and harming debtors. Wages and everyday prices stagnated while scarce credit inflated asset values, widening inequality between rentiers and wage earners.

The Civil War left the South bankrupt. Both sides financed war with paper money backed by victory. The Confederacy, defeated, could not honor its bonds; the North refused to redeem Southern IOUs. Goods costing $100 in 1860 reached $146 in the Union by 1865 but soared to $9,211 in the South. The postwar South, once rich on agriculture and enslaved labor, became the poorest region, its capital destroyed. Meanwhile, Wall Street boomed during the Gilded Age, which Thorstein Veblen dissected in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).

Railroad expansion brought millions of new acres under cultivation, pushing crop prices down even as farmers’ gold-denominated debts rose. In Kansas, corn fell from 43 cents per bushel in 1870 to 10 cents by 1890—below production cost. The Farmers’ Alliance advocated railroad regulation, federal loans, and bimetallism, alongside progressive causes like women’s suffrage. A Midwest-South coalition emerged.

The 1892 global crisis, triggered by Argentine defaults and the Barings bailout in London, spread through the Gold Standard to the United States, pushing unemployment to 20%. President Grover Cleveland prioritized buying gold to defend the dollar’s credibility over relief, reinforcing farmers’ suspicion of a banker-first elite. In 1894, Jacob Coxey led the first mass march on Washington, urging deficit-financed public works enabled by moving from gold to silver.

At the 1896 Democratic Convention, the party rejected its sitting president, nominated the little-known Bryan, and adopted the Populist platform to abandon gold. Bryan denounced the standard as a burden on humanity. He lost to Republican William McKinley. Yet in August 1896, Shaaw Tláa (Kate Carmack), a First Nations woman, discovered Klondike gold; finds in Colorado and South Africa followed, nearly doubling global gold supply over the next decade. The resulting monetary easing delivered what bimetallists sought without ending the Gold Standard: from 1897 to 1914, prices rose about 50%.

Baum, a journalist at the 1896 convention and a bimetallist, later wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) as an allegory. In 1937, just after President Franklin Roosevelt abandoned gold, MGM bought the rights. Filmed in Technicolor and released in 1939, the movie became a classic, its songs echoing a monetary debate most viewers never recognized.

In October 1913, James Joyce attended Verdi’s Aida in Trieste, an opera first commissioned for the Suez Canal opening. The canal exemplified how 19th-century financial engineering—public companies and stock markets—enabled megaprojects by spreading risk across thousands of investors. Triestine entrepreneur Pasquale Revoltella helped finance the canal and later served as its vice president. When it opened in 1869, cutting the Europe-to-India route by 5,000 miles and 10 days, Trieste—nestled in the Adriatic’s crook—surged. Port tonnage climbed from 960,103 tons in 1870 to over 5 million by 1913.

Money helped build this cosmopolitan city. The Austrian Empire’s Patent of Toleration and Edict of Tolerance empowered diverse groups to trade, making Trieste a crossroads of Italians, Austrians, Slovenes, Jews, Greeks, and Armenians. Its dialect borrowed from many languages. Karl Marx attributed Trieste’s edge over Venice to its cosmopolitan “motley crew” of merchant-adventurers unfettered by tradition. Commercial hubs attracted artists and writers as well as traders. Joyce arrived in 1905, teaching at the Revoltella School of Commerce while developing his fiction.

The prewar era saw a surge in exchanges—half the world’s stock markets were founded between 1880 and 1910. Business journalism rose to cover them; even Marx wrote for a financial newspaper while working on Das Kapital (1867). In December 1913, Ezra Pound told Joyce that he and W. B. Yeats had arranged for The Egoist magazine to publish and pay for Joyce’s work, finally clearing the decks for Ulysses (1922).

Commerce and modernism advanced together. Einstein worked on relativity, Picasso pioneered Cubism, and Freud developed psychoanalysis. Vienna, home to Freud, Klimt, and Wittgenstein, became a fulcrum. Innovation in art and business alike reflected Schumpeter’s creative destruction—new forms displaced old. Through Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein influenced John Maynard Keynes, the leading modernist economist, who rejected classical laissez-faire and rigid adherence to gold, arguing that money was a tool of state power and that economics studied human arrangements, not immutable laws.

Innovation exploded: Combined German, French, and British patent applications rose from 34,893 in 1905 to 46,086 in 1913; in America, from 39,673 to 68,117. Tea bags, air conditioning, tractors, and airplanes moved from invention to commercialization. Joyce joined the entrepreneurial wave. Spotting that Dublin lacked cinemas while Trieste has 21, he persuaded Triestine backers to grant him a 10% equity stake without capital. He launched the Volta cinema in Dublin, handling property, marketing, and publicity to pack its December 20, 1909, opening; the Evening Telegraph hailed the success. Joyce returned to Trieste in January 1910, leaving a manager in charge.

Artists and entrepreneurs shared an outlook: They imagined possibilities, accepted public risk, and created demand. Societies that rewarded such dissenters—from Florence and Amsterdam to Trieste—flourished. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in Ulysses—a Jew baptized three times—embodied the thriving outsider in a diverse city. Yet the fragility of this culture went largely unrecognized. In Vienna in 1913, a failed painter, Adolf Hitler, sold watercolors to tourists, while a Georgian revolutionary using the alias Stavros Papadopoulos—Josef Stalin—wrote about Marxism. Both would weaponize money and crush Europe’s artistic and commercial self-expression.

The year 1922 proved pivotal: Einstein won the Nobel Prize, the BBC made its first broadcast, Mussolini marched on Rome, and James Joyce published Ulysses. That September, Ernest Hemingway crossed from Strasbourg to Kehl to report German hyperinflation for the Toronto Star. On the French side, no one wanted marks. He exchanged 10 francs—less than one Canadian dollar—for 670 marks, enough for a day of heavy spending with money left over, while an elderly German could not afford a 12-mark apple. Savings, often in prewar government bonds, were obliterated. French children, rich in francs, gorged on German pastries.

When inflation destroys money, it breaks the state’s contract with citizens—the promise to protect savings in exchange for obedience. Germany financed World War I by borrowing, expecting victory to shift costs to the defeated. Instead, the Weimar Republic inherited vast war debts and reparations. A web of international debts emerged, with the United States holding $12 billion in Allied obligations as financial power tilted from London to New York. British Prime Minister Lloyd George vowed to squeeze Germany hard.

By 1920, reparations equaled roughly 100% of prewar GDP, requiring annual transfers of about 5%. Paying required shipping real goods without receiving hard currency, emptying shelves and cutting tax receipts. Germany sold marks for gold to pay abroad, weakening the currency, while the government printed money to pay producers for goods not sold domestically. The “stab-in-the-back” myth—blaming socialists, liberals, and Jews—gained traction. The fragile Weimar state faced communist demands for worker benefits and nationalist demands for war pensions, adding fiscal strain.

In June 1922, the assassination of Jewish foreign minister Walther Rathenau sparked panic. The mark fell from 190 to the dollar at the year’s start to 7,600 by December; prices rose fortyfold. In early 1923, after Germany failed to deliver telegraph poles as reparations in kind, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, seizing the industrial heartland. On January 11, 1923, the mark plunged from 27,000 to 50,000 per dollar in a day. Germans went on strike; companies resisted; reports of sexual violence surfaced, including the assault of Josephine Malakert by French sailors. Berlin printed money to pay striking workers, hoping pressure would force a French retreat before society collapses. By August, the dollar bought 620,000 marks; by November, 630 billion.

People rushed to spend before money died, flocking to cinemas to see Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, about a hypnotist manipulating markets. Speculators profited while ordinary savers lost everything; about a million Germans traded currencies to survive. Hyperinflation destroyed the middle class—teachers, civil servants, doctors, lawyers—who trusted the state and bought war bonds. Asset owners, such as landlords and industrialists, fared better as values adjusted, while indexed wages helped some workers keep pace. Those in the middle, society’s “ballast,” suffered most. In November 1923, as hyperinflation peaked, Adolf Hitler led the failed Munich Beer Hall putsch, positioning himself to exploit future catastrophe.

Two 1943 stories underscore money’s power. In Sachsenhausen, Jewish master forger Salomon Smolianoff—once a Berlin portraitist turned passport forger—was forced by SS officer Bernhard Krueger to lead a unit of 142 Jewish specialists to counterfeit British currency and try to break the Bank of England. Their lives depended on success. Five hundred miles south in Stalag VII-A, economist Richard Radford observed prisoners spontaneously building a market with Red Cross cigarettes as currency. Without formal authority, this money organized exchange and displayed cycles of inflation and deflation based on supply and confidence.

Smolianoff’s team discovered that English notes used pulped rags, not reed paper. They tested prototypes by having a German posing as an industrialist present them at a Swiss bank; the Bank of England confirmed authenticity. The operation printed £134,610,810—about four in every 10 pounds then in circulation. The plan to bomb Britain with counterfeits collapsed with the Luftwaffe, but the SS used the notes to buy war materiel, line pockets, and fund escape networks, even paying ransoms like Mussolini’s in forged sterling. After the war, shaken by the quality of the fakes, the Bank of England recalled all five-pound notes and issued new ones, revealing how close Hitler came to weaponizing money against Britain.