Why I'm Reading Goodson's History of Central Banking
I picked up a book whose title already sounds like a fight. It claims the people who print money also own the wars, the busts, and most of the last three thousand years. I am going to read it slowly, chapter by chapter, and say what holds.
Book: A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind | Author: Stephen Mitford Goodson | ISBN-13: 978-1-910881-49-1 | Publisher: Black House Publishing Ltd (1st ed. 2014; 2nd and 3rd 2017) | Author note: former non-executive director of the South African Reserve Bank
What this series is
This is a review and a retelling, not a reprint. I will walk through the book in order, put the claims in plain language, and add what I think as I go. If a date, a bank, or a law is real, I will say so. If the author jumps from a real bank to a secret motive, I will say that too.
The book is A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind by Stephen Mitford Goodson. Black House Publishing put out the first edition in 2014 and the second and third in 2017. The ISBN-13 is 978-1-910881-49-1. Goodson was a non-executive director of the South African Reserve Bank. He also wrote Inside the South African Reserve Bank: Its Origins and Secrets Exposed, which is the same fight from inside the building.
I am not reading this because I think it is a normal economics textbook. It is not. I am reading it because the money question it keeps poking is still live, and because a lot of people still pass around this exact story.
The thesis in one breath
Here is the core argument, said the way Goodson wants it said. When the state issues money, societies thrive. When private banks create money as interest-bearing debt, you get boom-bust cycles, war, and a transfer of power to a tiny clique.
That is the whole machine. Public money equals peace, full employment, and zero inflation. Bank money equals unemployment, inflation, and a slow theft of sovereignty. When a country tries to take the printer back, Goodson says the bankers “invoke a patriotic war” and crush the experiment.
You can hear why this lands. Most money in a modern economy is not coins. It is bank deposits, created when someone takes a loan. That part is not a fever dream. Central banks sit on top of that system. People have been angry about it since 2008, and they were angry before that too. The Fed, the national debt, who gets bailed out: none of that went away because a polite textbook changed the subject.
The eight chapters, in order
Chapter I starts in Rome. Cattle, copper lumps, then silver and gold. Goodson says usury ate the Republic and then the Empire. He also slots in an ethnic story about who did the eating. That mix never really leaves.
Chapter II is the Bank of England. 1694, national debt, a private company that lends the crown its own credit and collects interest forever. He treats Cromwell and Charles I as a banker coup with a flag on it.
Chapter III is Napoleon versus the bankers and the Banque de France. The claim is that a public state bank funded roads and war without handing the country to bondholders.
Chapter IV is the long one, so I am splitting it. First the United States and the Federal Reserve, told as Rothschild versus the people. Then Russia’s state bank, the Boer War, Australia, and World War I. This is where the conspiracy frame becomes the plot.
Chapter V is the Great Depression, the Bank for International Settlements, and the reform ideas that almost happened: C. H. Douglas, Irving Fisher, the Chicago Plan. Real documents live here next to motive stories.
Chapter VI is 1930s state banking in Germany, Italy, and Japan. I will report the banking claims. I will not wash the regimes. A jobs number does not cancel dictatorship, war, or mass murder.
Chapter VII is the modern exhibit case: the Bank of North Dakota, Guernsey’s debt-free notes, and Gaddafi’s Libya. Chapter VIII is the 2008 crash and the claim that debt-money makes panics on purpose. Then I will write down what I actually took from the book.
The part I will not swallow whole
I need to be honest up front. This book mixes a real debate about who creates money with a recycled conspiracy story that blames Jewish bankers and the Rothschilds for almost everything. Wars, crashes, assassinations, revolutions: the same names keep walking into the room.
I am going to retell those claims as his claims. I am not going to launder them into “everyone knows.” When he points at Jekyll Island, the BIS, Lincoln’s greenbacks, the McFadden speech, Guernsey notes, or the Bank of North Dakota, I will retell the institution. When he invents a secret letter or a Rothschild assassin, I will say the evidence is thin.
That split is the whole point of reading it in public. “Banks create money as debt” is a fight you can have with a textbook. “A secret ethnic cabal has run every event since ancient Rome” is a different book wearing the first book’s coat.
Why it still matters
People are still angry about the Fed. They are still angry about household debt, student loans, and a crash that socialized losses. They still ask who owns the money printer. Ignoring Goodson does not make that question go away. It just leaves the question to the worst version of the answer.
So I am reading him the way I would read a loud uncle who once sat on a real board. He has seen a central bank from the inside. He has a simple theory. Some of the plumbing is real. Some of the history is a greatest-hits album of old pamphlets. I want both on the table.
If you only want a hero narrative, this series will annoy you. If you only want a dunk, it will annoy you too. I want to finish the book knowing which sentences I would defend and which ones I would throw out.
The rest of the series
You can jump around. I would not. The argument piles up, and the war thesis in the introduction is the engine for everything after Rome.
- The Foreword That Admits This Book Will Make You Mad
- How Usury Destroyed the Roman Empire, According to Goodson
- The Hidden Origins of the Bank of England
- Napoleon vs the Bankers: The Banque de France Story
- America vs the Fed: Goodson’s Century of Struggle
- The Russian State Bank, the Boer War, and World War I
- The Great Depression, the BIS, and the Chicago Plan
- State Banking in Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1930s
- North Dakota, Guernsey, and Gaddafi’s Libya
- The 2008 Crash, Debt Money, and Goodson’s Last Chapter
- What I Took From Goodson’s Central Banking History
Next up is the foreword by Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi and Goodson’s own introduction. The prince says he cannot verify the findings. The author says history is the only subject that matters, and that private bankers start wars when you touch the printer. That is the door. I am walking through it.