https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/the-greed-for-gold-and-glory-dr-martin
A Book Review
Unbekoming
Apr 16, 2026

The square-mile financial district at the heart of Greater London is not part of the United Kingdom. The City of London Corporation governs itself under charters older than the Norman Conquest, collects its own taxes, runs its own police, and the reigning monarch must request permission to enter. Since 1957 it has operated as the command centre of a stateless offshore network — the Eurodollar market, the Crown Dependencies of Jersey and Guernsey, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong — which by 2008 handled more than half of all international stock transactions, seventy percent of Eurobonds, and fifty-five percent of global IPOs. Martin Erdmann’s The Greed for Gold and Glory, published in December 2025 by Verax Vox Media after four years of research, argues that this arrangement is the present-day operating core of a system first perfected by Venetian oligarchs in the thirteenth century. The book runs to 425 pages with a twenty-eight-page bibliography. Its argument is that mercantilism was never abolished; it was successively relocated.

Erdmann traces the pattern across seven centuries and six capitals. Venice developed the template — a closed oligarchy of merchant families, state-granted trade monopolies, privatised money creation, and extraction backed by naval force. Spain inherited the form and ruined itself on American silver. France under Colbert industrialised it into state economic planning. Amsterdam refined the banking machinery. London scaled the whole apparatus globally through the British East India Company, the Bank of England, and the Royal Navy. Across the Atlantic the Boston merchant dynasties — Perkins, Cabot, Forbes, Higginson — imported the template and financed the young American republic on slaving voyages and the Chinese opium trade. When the British Empire dissolved after 1945, the City of London did not dissolve with it; it re-engineered itself through offshore Eurodollars, the Crown Dependencies, and the post-1986 deregulated banking regime into a financial sovereignty larger than anything Venice commanded. Erdmann’s claim is that the governing families, the extractive mechanism, and the ideology that legitimises it have held their shape across every one of these transitions.

The author is not writing from outside the academy. Erdmann holds a doctorate in modern church history from Brunel University London, a habilitation in systematic theology from Károli Gáspár University in Budapest, and spent five years as senior scientist at the University Hospital in Basel researching the ethical implications of nanotechnology. His method throughout the book is documentary. Claims are anchored to archive.org scans of nineteenth-century monographs, Acts of Parliament reproduced in full, published merchant correspondence, Masonic lodge records, the Federalist Papers, and contemporary financial journalism, most notably Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands, which appeared in 2011 after serialisation in the New Statesman and which established the modern offshore map. Readers inclined to verify any particular claim can generally do so in a few minutes at the cited source. The evidence for each individual step is publicly filed and largely uncontested in its specifics; what provokes is the pattern the evidence forms once assembled.

The 1694 founding of the Bank of England anchors the book’s economic argument. The Scottish financier William Paterson — rumoured in his own time to have been a pirate — approached the Whig Junto with a proposal on behalf of a group of City of London merchants. The group would lend the Crown £1.2 million at eight percent interest to fund the ongoing war against France. In return, Parliament would grant their joint-stock company the privilege of issuing banknotes: a private licence to create money. Albert Feavearyear’s The Pound Sterling documents that the original subscribers were not drawn in by the eight percent yield. They were drawn in by the opportunity to become the first private institution in English history legally authorised to coin credit. The Act of 1694 remains publicly available, and its long title states the purpose without decoration — to raise funds towards carrying on the war against France. Voting rights required £500 in shares at a time when £50 was a solid middle-class annual income, and directorships required £2,000, which excluded ninety percent of shareholders and effectively the entire non-Whig English population. The sovereign right to issue money, previously in the hands of a monarch at least nominally answerable to his subjects, passed permanently into private hands answerable to no one.

The chapter on the Boston opium syndicate is the book’s most uncomfortable for an American reader. Between roughly 1789 and 1840, a small circle of Boston Brahmin families — Perkins, Cabot, Lowell, Forbes, Cushing, Sturgis, Higginson — built fortunes of a scale that still shapes American philanthropy, academia, and political life by trafficking Turkish and Bengal opium into China in defiance of Qing law. Erdmann traces the genealogies with the care of a family-office auditor. Thomas H. Perkins controlled roughly half of American trade with China in the 1830s; his nephew John Perkins Cushing ran operations in Canton from the age of sixteen; Robert Bennet Forbes, orphaned and raised by Perkins, became managing director of the merged Russell & Company opium syndicate in 1840. The profits flowed home into the Lowell textile mills, whose cotton came from southern slave plantations, into the publishing house D. Appleton & Company, into Baring Bank in London, and into the endowments of institutions whose names are still spoken with reverence. Erdmann calls the 1619 Project misguided propaganda. The troubling historical fact it gestures at, however, is real: the early American economy was substantially built on piracy, slavery, and the drug trade, and the families who built it remained at the commanding heights of American life long after those particular trades became unmentionable in polite company.

The 1787 Constitutional Convention is handled in a similar register. Drawing on Charles Beard’s 1913 An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States — a work once standard in American political science and quietly marginalised in recent decades — Erdmann documents that the fifty-five delegates swore lifelong oaths of secrecy, excluded the press, placed the meeting room on the second floor to frustrate eavesdropping, and in several cases exceeded the authority their states had given them. Several states had expressly forbidden their delegates from drafting a new constitution. The delegates drafted one anyway. The ratification threshold of nine states directly contradicted the Articles of Confederation then in force, which required unanimity for amendment. Beard demonstrated that every delegate belonged to the creditor class, that the Articles had devolved financial regulation to the individual states, and that federal bonds held by the delegates and their associates totalled $75 million in a nation of fewer than four million people — bonds that could only be redeemed at face value through a new central government with the power to tax. Erdmann does not claim Beard’s thesis is the whole story of the Founding. He claims it is the suppressed half of the story, and that its suppression in favour of a purely philosophical account is itself evidence of how the system has always protected its own origin myths.

The book’s most demanding material, which Erdmann himself warns his readers requires patience, concerns the spiritual infrastructure beneath the economic one. Chapters four and five trace the Kabbalistic, Hermetic, and Rosicrucian lineage running through the Royal Society, the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666, Isaac Newton’s alchemical and anti-Trinitarian writings, and the Masonic networks that organised the American Revolution out of Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern. The specifics are documented: Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral laid out with ten domes corresponding to the Sephirot of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life; Nicholas Hawksmoor’s London churches incorporating obelisks, pyramids, and cubes drawn from pre-Christian esoteric sources; the lodge memberships of George Washington and essentially all of his general staff; the Saint Andrew Lodge in Boston functioning as the operational planning centre for the Sons of Liberty. Erdmann does not argue that every Enlightenment figure was a secret occultist. He argues that a coherent esoteric worldview — the belief that fallen humanity could be restored to Edenic perfection through sacred geometry, universal science, and eventually the alchemical creation of credit money from nothing — supplied the ideological fuel for the projects that built the modern West. He writes as a Christian theologian, which he does not disguise. Readers unfamiliar with the framework are asked to withhold judgment until the pattern has been assembled across the whole book. For those willing to make that investment, these chapters supply an answer to a question most economic histories cannot answer: why credit money, loaned into existence from nothing, became the central organising fact of the modern economy.

The Greed for Gold and Glory will not be reviewed in the Financial Times. It belongs to a small body of serious independent scholarship — Shaxson on offshore banking, Carroll Quigley on the Anglo-American establishment, Beard on the Constitution — that has attempted to map territory mainstream economic history has left blank. Erdmann’s distinctive contribution is a documentary account of what the men who built the system actually believed they were doing, drawn largely from their own published writings. The full edition is not short and does not reward hurried reading. It asks the reader to follow a seven-century argument across fifty-five chapters and several thousand footnotes, and to accept by the end that the system under which we currently live was not an accident of Enlightenment progress but the deliberate construction of identifiable families pursuing identifiable ends over a very long time. An abridged edition by Beate Gsell exists for readers who want the argument without the full documentary apparatus; both are available on Amazon. Readers who have long suspected that the official explanations of how the world actually works do not quite fit the facts will find in Erdmann the documentary record they have been looking for. It is worth the four years he spent writing it.

With thanks to Dr. Martin Erdmann.