What do an Indonesian volcano, Frankenstein and Shaka Zulu have in common?

A fully updated Chapter 16 of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom

The fully updated edition of Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom will be available in January 2025. Over the coming months, paid subscribers can access (and provide feedback on) some of the updated chapters as I post them here. Chapter 3, Chapter 5, Chapter 11 and Chapter 36 are already available. Please consider a paid subscription to access them as well as my twice-weekly content, including columns, guest essays, interviews and summaries of the latest research.

---

In April 1816 eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin travelled to Geneva with her lover, the poet Percy Shelley. (They had eloped and were to marry later in the year.) They stayed in Geneva for the summer with her half-sister, Claire, and another of England’s great poets, Lord Byron. But the weather was terrible. Instead of rowing on a calm and pleasant Lake Geneva, Mary wrote of a ‘wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain [that] often confined us for days to the house’.¹ It was during one such dark and stormy evening that a member of the travelling party suggested a game: each should write a ghost story. After several days of toying with different ideas, Mary Shelley conjured up the story of Victor Frankenstein, who creates a monster in a scientific experiment. Published in 1818, Frankenstein changed literary history and is today considered one of the first science fiction books. It still sells approximately 40,000 copies per year.

But 1816 was not all fun and games.