The House of Rothschild - Money's prophets, 1798 - 1848 - (1st

Publishers Weekly:
Anyone interested in finance, European history or the rise of one spectacularly successful Jewish family will find the first volume of this history of the Rothschilds spellbinding. Equipped with unprecedented access to pre-1915 Rothschild archives, Oxford historian Ferguson begins the family history with Frankfurt merchant Mayer Amschel, but the real story starts with the arrival of the most capable of his sons, Nathan Mayer, in England 200 years ago. Each of Mayer's five sons was located in different cities--Paris, London, Vienna, Naples and Frankfurt. Combined with a mandated unity that kept the brothers remarkably close while excluding daughters, in-laws and strangers, this geographic dispersal gave the family's financial firm an unbeatable edge, despite Mayer's sons being of unequal competence. N.M. Rothschild is the one Ferguson chooses as his protagonist (his great-great-grandson suggested the project to the author). It was largely because of this Finanzbonaparte that from 1815 on, the Rothschilds were everywhere part of Europe--they dominated the international bond market; bought and sold commodities such as cotton, tobacco, sugar, copper and mercury; and influenced Metternich, Wellington, Queen Victoria, Bismarck, Gladstone and Disraeli. Using his access to the 13,000 entries in the Rothschild files, Ferguson debunks myths and carefully reconstructs the truth. Not only has he done a brilliant job of depicting this far-flung family but he also manages to offer an amazing insider's look at the financial, political and military aspects of early 19th-century European life. His exhaustive study surpasses anything about the Rothschilds to date.

Kirkus Reviews:
The fabulous history of a legendary family, reviled by many, lauded by many others, and fascinating to all, is told again, this time with encyclopedic exactitude. British scholar Ferguson (History/Oxford) has done exhaustive research, drawing on musty archives worldwide, and he uses long extracts from Rothschild family correspondence never before publicly presented. A generation ago, Frederick Morton's bestselling romantic history of the family evolved into a Broadway musical. No such transformation is likely for this massive work. This telling is businesslike and straightforward, which somehow emphasizes the story's inherent extravagant romance. There are, to be sure, extended passages dealing with financial transactions together with charts detailing, for example, such arcana as the "weekly closing prices of 3 percent consols, 1828-1832." The scholarly analyses of old balance sheets and financial statements, however, give way to the complex story of how the founder and his five sons came to bestride the world of international finance, creating the modern government-bond market, underwriting the advent of railroads (the hot stocks of their day), bankrolling geopolitics, commanding swift communication, and fathering the art of public relations. The brothers and their sons were the very models of modern merchant bankers, all the while stubbornly retaining their Judaism and marrying only within their endogamous clan. They dealt democratically with the likes of Wellington and Metternich, Disraeli and Heine, Balzac and Rossini. Ferguson's mighty book closes with a Rothschild entering Cambridge while another takes his seat as a member of Parliament without the hitherto required oath ofChristian fealty. It covers the first quarter of a history that began two centuries ago in the fetid ghetto of Frankfurt.
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