A Novel · Forthcoming
Hustler's Empire
The Philosophy of Money in a Historical Novel on Finance:
The Shifting of Empires
Four hustlers. One empire changing hands.
For readers of Ken Follett and David Liss
A historical novel of Wall Street, financial panic, and the rise of the American dollar.
About the Book
The story.
Nathaniel Murphy has the speculator's gift — he can read a market's timing better than any man in the room. He reads London's, too, and stakes his future there, on the empire that has always been the empire. He is not wrong about the mechanics. He is wrong about which way the current is running.
Jack Kelley learns everything Nate knows and adds one thing Nate never had: an empire rising at his back instead of fading beneath his feet. He is not the more gifted man. He is the man standing on the side of history that is still climbing.
J.P. Morgan saves the system once, in a library, by force of personal will — and understands, watching himself do it, that a country cannot keep depending on one man's nerve. So he spends his last years building the thing that replaces him: a permanent structure, collective and self-sustaining, so the rescue never again depends on a single man in a single room.
And beneath all three of them, the largest hustler of all: a nation. Independent since 1776, but economically still a junior partner to London for over a century — until, between 1907 and 1913, the ground shifts. Not with a declaration. With a thousand small bets, a thousand small loans, until one morning the world's reserve currency has quietly changed hands, and almost no one in London has noticed yet.
Why it matters now
"Every generation forgets it was ever any other way. The dollar's status as the world's reserve currency isn't a law of nature — it was won, deliberately, one small bet and one small loan at a time, in the years between 1907 and 1913. Most Americans alive today have never known a world without that advantage — and have little sense of how different their daily lives would look without it. Hustler's Empire is a reminder of how that advantage was made, one hustler at a time — and how easily, in other hands, it could have gone to London instead."
"Every empire in history has believed, at its peak, that it was the exception — that the rules which ended Rome, or Spain, or Britain, simply didn't apply to it. The United States is no different, and it is also, in the span of empires, still young: barely two and a half centuries into an experiment that Britain ran for longer before its own reckoning arrived. Hustler's Empire is set at the moment America first felt its own strength — 1907 to 1913 — not to celebrate the ascent, but to remember that it was still, and remains, a chapter in a much older story. No empire has ever been the last one."
The Author
Curtis Rice
Curtis Rice grew up in western Oklahoma, on land his great-grandparents claimed in the 1893 land run. He started his first business as a teenager hauling hay, and along the way ran cattle, worked feedlots, and checked wells in the oilfield.
He has spent nearly thirty years in markets, hedge funds, and private equity. He began on an energy derivatives desk, then built a physical trading business for a hedge fund, growing a two-man shop into a major desk with the credit and risk-analysis systems underneath it. Later, in senior roles at public and private-equity-backed infrastructure companies, he originated and structured billions of dollars in long-term contracts. Alongside that career, he built an independent buy-side investment firm spanning real estate, private credit, venture, and energy.
He has a passion for understanding history by following the money. He enjoys macroeconomics — how money, interest rates, capital, supply, and demand move markets, countries, and eventually empires. History is typically carried by the flow of money. Or at least rewritten by those who have it.
He holds an MBA in finance from the University of Tulsa and a degree in finance and economics from Oklahoma State University, where he advises the School of Entrepreneurship. He lives in Tulsa with his family. Hustler's Empire is his first novel.
Where to Buy
Coming soon.
Hustler's Empire is forthcoming. Publisher and retailer links will appear here when the release date is announced — subscribe above to be the first to know.