Any number of good books and studies aim to remedy this gap in our understanding, and one of the best ways of doing it, paradoxically, is to fix complicated impersonal finances into a figure of a single person who can be thought to have made military-style strategic decisions. In Richard Vague’s new book, “The Banker Who Made America: Thomas Willing and the Rise of the American Financial Aristocracy, 1731-1821” (Polity), we have a hero worthy of the enterprise. Indeed, it is telling that Willing’s name is presented only in the subtitle, on the understandable ground that, without giving the role he played top billing, his name would mean nothing.