The World's Banker. The History of the House of Rothschild.

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There he began a business career that made him a respectable, if not prosperous man. As the years went on, he trained his five sons in business and began to establish them in the cities that would house the five branches of the family bank: Frankfurt (Amschel), London (Nathan), Naples (Carl), Vienna (Solomon), and Paris (James). One of the reviewer's first tasks is to give to the prospective reader some sense of what the book contains. Wormell's attempt at this is to say the least perfunctory. The book, he writes, 'is bedded in the nineteenth-century Europe's diplomatic manoeuvrings, wars and preparations for wars'. So much for that. He devotes half a sentence to the central issue of the family's Judaism. He gives the reader almost no inkling of the contributions the book makes to the social, political and cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe. This second of two volumes on the history of The House of Rothschild, written by Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, continues the family’s adventures from the third to the fifth generation, and then up to the turn of the 21st century. With exception of the epilogue, which draws on public materials, the Author’s sources include the private correspondence of family members and is thus able to offer an original insight into the family’s history. Despite Ferguson’s clear and fluent prose, I sometimes felt lost in the narrative because of the growing number of family members, unable to know who was whom. Despite the turmoil of these years, the family’s wealth grew and when Nathan died in 1836, his fortune was easily twice (and possibly as much as five times) that of the next wealthiest man in England in the 1830s-50s; thus, making him the wealthiest man in the world by far. At his death, brother James became the leading figure in the family until shortly before his own death in 1868.

Nathaniel Rothschild is Kanye West. To the European nobles he did business with: He knows you don't like him, he sees you cringing at his Jewishness, but he also knows he runs the show, and he's going to make damn sure you know it. You get giddy reading the contempt he has for the average European aristocrat. It's delightfully similar to the joy we all take, and I'm sure Kanye takes, in making a fool out of Taylor Swift. This is fascinating but very dense. Not for every reader. If you love financial history though, it is great. Why were the French more willing to pay for defeat after the fact than to pay for the chance of victory before war broke out?" (re: Napoleon III's France's willingness to pay more money in reparations than for the initial war in 1870). (p.217) While many contemporaries noted the irony of Jewish bankers being the main prop for the the "Holy Alliance" of Catholic monarchies in the East, and the Protestant ones in the West, Ferguson shows that in fact if the Rothschild's had a bias towards anything it was towards peace, an expensive and armed peace they preferred, but peace nonetheless. They often also used their clout to demand increased rights for Jews and sometimes even more parliamentry democracy, which they thought stabilized investments. Perhaps the best part of the book is showing the Rothschild's participation in the tangled webs of international diplomacy at the time, where ideologies were attached to regimes and countries like in few later periods. Liberals tended to support French and Belgian claims in any circumstances, while reactionaries supported Austria and Prussia, and domestic politics often involved playing off different nations as much as different policies. On the whole, the Rothschild worked across these ideological lines, but they turned more Whig and liberal as time went on. I’ve watched the aforementioned series and thought he was interesting enough to look up his earlier works.James, Salomon and Nathan all came under conflicting pressures from the governments in Paris, Vienna and London: but the final outcome was a united and carefully calculated policy of non-commitment. (p. 132) if you want capital without interest, buy land. If you want your interest without capital, buy shares" (p. 428) Now, with all the depth, clarity and drama with which he traced their ascent, Ferguson - the first historian with access to the long-lost Rothschild family archives - concludes his myth-breaking portrait of once of the most fascinating and power families of all time. Although an Austrian Emperor had elevated the brothers (hence the “von” or “de” designation), the English branch (Nathan) had not used the title. His son Lionel, although elected to the House of Commons in 1847, he was unable to be seated (there was a Christian oath required). After numerous re-elections, he was finally seated in 1858 as the first Jewish MP (Disraeli did not count having taken the standard oath). Although proposed, Queen Victoria refused to elevate him to a peerage. In 1885 she made Lionel’s son Nathan Mayer (more of a full-time politician than his father) the first Jewish member of the House of Lords,

In this second volume, the author gives us in detail the history of the family until about 1918. For the period thereafter, he provides more summary than before (some of which is recounted as oral conversations instead of archived source material). For the years after World War II, an epilogue covers the effects of their losses (due to seizure and nationalization during the war years) and the transformation of the remaining branches of the business into the current modern forms (including the revival of a Frankfurt office.) The family remained Jewish in faith and race. They may not have been the most devout, buy they did observe the rules and laws and did not “convert” like many others (e.g. Benjamin Disraeli’s family.) When one of Nathan’s daughters did convert to marry, she was shunned by almost everyone including her own mother. They were seen as exemplars of successful Jews who also cared about their “co-religionists”; speaking out for tolerance and donating to community needs and causes.

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Nonetheless what is most remarkable is not that historian Ferguson sometimes revealed a very poor understanding of financial market theory but rather just how few such gaffes he committed outside of his area of core competency that of doing historical research. Held against its tremendous virtues, the flaws in this book are really of very little consequence. Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, former Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and current senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and founder and managing director of advisory firm Greenmantle LLC. If you, like me, groan loudly at shows and cultural items that glorify European nobility, from Pierre in War and Peace to all the Victorian movies/shows where every male actor looks like Eddie Redmayne, then the story of Rothschilds will be deeply satisfying. Niall Ferguson is a fantastic writer, but if I may riff for a second... Once you leave that question and the vagaries of bond finance aside, the book becomes lot more interesting for the lay reader with fascinating descriptions of their family affairs, their dealings with polity, kings, ministers and aristocrats and other banks. Also fascinating is their assimilation into national behaviour of typical of their class, such as engagement in horse racing and hunting and building of fabulous houses and gardens. There are few poignant stories like Amschel’s fascination for a beautiful tiny garden after a child and youth spent in the Jewish ghetto. This is wonderful book which should be read by anyone interested in the history of France, England, and Germany. Several shortcomings of this book however should be noted. Niall Ferguson is an Oxford history professor who mistakenly believes that his rudimentary knowledge of finance also includes a basic understanding of the theory of financial markets. It does not which results in Ferguson arriving at some quite laughable conclusions.