This is an account of what some have called the first emerging markets crisis. It features a hero of the war of Venezuelan independence who’s really, really good at retreating, mostly without his troops; then there's the fall of Napoleon and the fallout from that, the hassles involved in moving on to a gold standard, hot IPOs from the era’s hottest industries, and the Greeks. (They defaulted, of course they defaulted.) How could we forget the Greeks?