PUGNARE: Economic Success and Failure

George Maher came to London, like Dick Whittington, with little money in his pocket and made his fortune and career there. With the benefit of a good Irish education, he started work at a financial consultancy determined to learn his craft and benefit from the experiences of the senior partners.

Year after year brought new projects, new successes, new failures and insights into how the world really works. He rose to be partner himself and wondered what to do next.

While still advising companies from around the world and helping governments solve problems like how to manage riot risk or how to avoid deaths on the roads he studied for a degree in Classics, relearning the Latin he had learnt as a boy and learning new facts about history. Along the way he had an idea. What about applying all that he had learnt about how the modern world works to the world of the Roman Empire? Nobody had done something like that before. And in any case the main thing he had learnt from looking at hundreds of different companies in many different countries was that human nature does not change and success and failure depend on understanding that. Maybe there was something that we could learn from the Romans and their amazing successes and failures. But first he needed credibility. So he studied for a PhD in the Roman Economy. His thesis is now published as the Imperial Roman Economy. 

But he felt that all of these insights and new ways of looking at things which he had discovered along the way should not stay hidden. So he decided to write Pugnare and share what he had found.

It is a story about how we can learn from the Roman Empire. It shines a new light for the first time on an old story, because he had come a different path.