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

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it was always a weakness of the conservative argument against higher taxation that in general private charitability at the turn of the century tended to fall short of the traditional 10 per cent" (p. 276)

The author of 15 books, Ferguson is writing a life of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which--Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist--was published in 2015 to critical acclaim. The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History. Other titles include Civilization: The West and the Rest, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die and High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg. The author is Niall Ferguson an unrepentant booster of monetary systems and capitalism. You may remember him from the PBS series, “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World” or “Civilization: The West and the Rest” both of which are also books. (Also broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK.) He is a historian and currently is a Professor of History at Harvard University and holds other postings. And while not everyone in the family may have been financially astute (or even keen on making it their career), they became (like many other late-Victorian/Edwardian era gentlemen botanists, naturalists, and other forms of scientists – with many writing learned papers on their subject. Theirs is a rags-to-riches story. The Jewish Ghetto of Frankfurt was one of the most repressive in Western or Central Europe. Begun in the 12th century it had not changed much in the 18th: the laws controlling the lives and livelihoods of Jews were very strict and repressive. The man who is considered the “founder” of the famous branch of the family, Mayer Amschel Rothschild (an Ashkenazi Jew) began life as the son of a respectable man, but not one of wealth. Both of his parents died before his thirteen birthday and after and apprenticeship in Hanover, he returned to Frankfurt in1764. The family in some sense seemed to resemble gods to their fellow Jewish people, the family also heaped scorn on those who converted to Christianity for personal (and apparently shortsighted) gain, while similarly also disowning family members who did not take up the family business and even more so if they converted to Christianity. Also of note in their early years, it sounded like they were willing to give decent shares of the business in their estates to family members who were NOT immediately sons or daughters just to keep the size enough for them to be interested.

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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.) 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. When Ferguson notes that after 1850s, the new banks began to achieve higher profitability than the Rothschilds he decides that their responsible lending habits have become excessively conservative. Apparently, Ferguson is so much in love with the myth in economics of the heroic risk-tasking entrepreneur that even irresponsible risk taking becomes praiseworthy. To write the history of the biggest financial institution of the nineteenth century in the space of five years - the time granted to me when I was commissioned to write the two hundred history of N.M. Rothschild & Sons - was by any standards a great challenge. The task was not made easier by the fact that a great deal of the correspondence of the Rothschild partners was written in Judendeutsch, right up until the 1860s. And what voluminous correspondence! The most important letters in the London archive, the so-called 'private letters' between the partners in the bank between 1812 and 1898, fill 135 boxes. To give just one example: in March 1848 the London Rothschilds received at least sixty important private letters from their counterparts on the continent. To add to the challenge there was already a large, though far from reliable, literature on the family, extending far beyond conventional scholarship to include - again, by way of example - the novels of Balzac, Disraeli and Zola.

A major work of economic, social and political history, Niall Ferguson's The House of Rothschild: The World's Banker 1849-1999 is the second volume of the acclaimed, landmark history of the legendary Rothschild banking dynasty. Niall Ferguson's House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets 1798-1848 was hailed as a 'great biography' by Time magazine and named one of the best books of 1998 by Business Week. As the history of Europe unfolded around them, the family was able to conduct business between countries and even warring states (their primary business during this period was lending to governments or rulers). Changes in the balance of power and rulership began to liberalize the laws in many countries, although the German states remained behind other. England was, by far, the most liberal at this time.What if someone wrote a book claiming that the development of modern capitalism was the product of a secretive and inbred family of Jews, for half a century the wealthiest men alive, the bankers to every major European monarch, who gained their fortune as war profiteers in the age of Napoloeon and went on to control the international bond market and the currency exchanges of Europe, who pulled the strings of diplomacy and empire throughout the Hundred Years’ Peace when Europe ruled the world, a family whose hundred tentacles still extend, secretive as ever, through the banks and financiers of the world, and who are behind some of the largest and most sinister corporations of the last century, such as Rio Tinto Mining Corporation and De Beers Diamonds? Ha! What kind of neo-Nazi nut case would whip up a conspiracy theory that grandiose and unlikely?! Robert Skidelsky, The New York Review of Books 'Niall Ferguson's brilliant and altogether enthralling two-volume family saga proves that academic historians can still tell great stories that the rest of us want to read' In the second generation most of the family’s wealth was spent “carefully”. Property investments were selected partly for comfort but also for business (either client relations, banking, or as money-earning investments). In the third and later generations (and James, as he lived into these later years), they began to buy and create grander and grander estates. At this time they also acquired many of the works of art that were lost in the confiscations of WWII. Nathan’s son, Nathaniel, who went and stayed in France, bought the vineyard today known as Mouton Rothschild in 1853. (Before the 1855 Classification of Bordeaux). Fifteen years later, Uncle James bought the much larger Chateau Lafite (Lafite Rothschild). It was an amazing account of how merchants could set themselves up as bankers and establish banking houses across multiple countries, overcome the barriers just about all other Jews faced at the time (including restrictions on land ownership), and how family members could be "kept in line." Of course Ferguson demolishes many of the myths that have surrounded the Rothschilds since their ascent, much of which emerged from scurrilous anti-Semitic tracts (for instance, Nathan Rothschild didn't make his fortune buying bonds when he heard first the information about Waterloo, in fact, he had large contracts out to supply the army that peace, at least at this point, threatened to cancel). Still, Ferguson wonderfully explains how the family's Jewish identify helped them succeed and at the same time kept them out of the top realms of power. Still, their desire for a removal from the Christian world often lead to a stunning amount of inbreeding in the third and later generations of the family that one cannot help but be baffled at.