Four books, all circling the same question: who holds power, and at whose expense.

Every day, the money in your pocket, the loan on your house, and the reserves of your nation pass through a system almost no one can see — a hidden architecture of credit, currency, and debt that decides who prospers and who merely survives. We are taught to think of money as neutral, a technical matter best left to experts. It never has been. Money is power wearing the disguise of plumbing.

In The Debt Order, I trace that architecture from the first clay tablets of ancient debt to the dollar's rise and the digital money now being built to replace it. I show how a handful of states, central banks, and asset managers came to govern the credit of the entire planet — and why a system that locks most of the world out of ownership is not only unjust but dangerously unstable.

Written from the vantage of the Global South, this is the financial and monetary sequel to Manufacturing World Order: the same unflinching questions — Who made the rules? Who enforces them? Who benefits? — carried down to the machinery of debt on which everything else rests. As the dollar order fractures, as China builds its exits, and as money itself becomes programmable, surveilled, and switched off at a keystroke, I ask what comes next — and who it will be built to serve.

At two thousand metres above the Lombok Sea, there is a crater lake that should not exist. The Sasak people call it Segara Anak — the Child of the Sea. It is beautiful, turquoise, and ringed by the walls of a caldera nine kilometres wide. It was created in a matter of hours, in 1257, when the mountain above it collapsed into its own emptied interior after one of the most violent volcanic eruptions the planet has produced in two thousand years.

That lake is the scar. This book is the story of the wound.

In the summer of 1257, Mount Samalas erupted with a force that injected more sulfur into the stratosphere than any volcanic event in recorded history. It buried a kingdom. It sent a climate shock rippling across the medieval world that destroyed harvests from England to Japan, disrupted the monsoon across South and Southeast Asia, and may have triggered the onset of the Little Ice Age. And then, for nearly eight centuries, it was forgotten — the most consequential natural event of the last millennium, hiding in plain sight on an island most of the world had never heard of.

I was born on that island. I have climbed to the rim of Segara Anak more times than I can count. In Samalas, I tell the story of the eruption that made the lake at the top of my world — and of everything, across four continents and seven centuries, that the mountain took with it when it fell.

Four babad — the oral chronicle tradition of Lombok — carried into English for the first time: Babad Lombok, Babad Sakra, Babad Praya, and Babad Selaparang. These are the island's own histories, told the way they were passed down, not the way outsiders later wrote them.