Joseph Wright, a young, alcoholic, mixed-race man, lives alone in a Peckham council flat earning a living by solving tough problems for people in his community. A chance phone call leads him on a tense trail from the poverty of London housing estates to gold mines in Ghana, and from the sinister underbelly of London's global service sector to the gaudy riches of Mayfair.

As Joseph struggles to make sense of his own story, he takes the reader on a dangerous journey of discovery towards a truth that should be as unpalatable as it is unacceptable for those who still want to believe in democracy. In doing so he finds both the personal and institutional reasons for the gaping inequality in economic outcomes we see today and has to confront powerful forces, which, over hundreds of years, have captured much of the world's history for their own ends.