The Last of the Imperious Rich: Lehman Brothers, 1844-2008 by Peter Chapman

A review by Steve Weinberg

As books about the collapse of Wall Street investment bankers rain down from publishers, one book focusing on Lehman Bros. places the history above the more recent scandal. For Peter Chapman, a Londoner who writes and edits for the Financial Times, the past is prologue. Finding the seeds of Lehman Bros.' destruction within a chronicle looking backward to 1844 is challenging, but ultimately worth the effort.

The Last of the Imperious Rich: Lehman Brothers, 1844-2008, begins with the arrival by ship of Henry Lehman in New York City, as he escapes a German region shot through with political oppression and anti-Semitism. Two younger brothers, Emanuel and Mayer, followed Henry to the United States when they came of age.

The brothers did not look to teeming New York City at first as their center of operations. Instead, they settled in Montgomery, Ala., hoping to make money from the pre-Civil War cotton economy, grounded in cheap slave labor.

Alabama was mostly rural, and Lehman...

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