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

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

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

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This family is a real rags to riches family. Starting from unthinkable conditions (and restrictions) in Frankfurt's Jugendgasse, to the pinnacle of finance in less than 2 generations. I look forward to the second part.

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) 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. I’ve watched the aforementioned series and thought he was interesting enough to look up his earlier works.

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. 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. 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' 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).

The text is illustrated with graphs, tables, diagrams and figures; some sources are transcribed in the appendixes. Sadly, illustrations are difficult to follow on certain Kindle models, and notes were suppressed in the paper and Kindle editions. The scholarly reader should prefer the hardcover edition.

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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. Three things would give an investor and edge over his rival: closeness to the center of political life, the source of news; the speed with which he could receive news of events in the states far and near, and the ability to manipulate the transmission of that news to other investors." (p. 5)

This book has a lot of detail, which I enjoyed quite a bit. In addition to detail about the family it goes into depth about finance and economics, and the politics (and wars, etc.) going on in Europe during the first half of the 19th century, obviously as how they pertain to the Rothschild family. Ferguson charts the travails of the Rothschilds as they expand from humble merchants in Frankfurt to probably the richest and most influential bankers ever. He has an interesting analysis that supports his hypothesis that no one in this world has ever been richer compared to his fellow man than Nathan Rothschild. I also appreciate his analysis that showed while the London house was the biggest in the early 1800's, the other houses grew more after that and were equals to London by the time of Nathan's death. 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 Rothschilds, it should be stressed, did not need to go to Cambridge, much mess Oxford, any more than they needed to sit in the House of Commons. The education of Rothschild children remained for most of the nineteenth century a much more cosmopolitan affair than the ancient English public schools and universities could provide. Thus the family continued to rely on private tutors and to send children abroad for a substantial part of their studies, to ensure above all that they maintained the family's multilingualism." (p. 43) Lines like "When a Jew lends to a noble, he owns that noble" sound conspiratorial now, but he is not wrong in seeing himself as the winner of the Napoleonic Wars. And you have to love that he would drunkenly horrify/entertain his guests later in life by putting on all the courtly uniforms of the courts that had knighted him. He trolls with the best. 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.



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