Review: The House of Rothschild: The World's Banker 1849-1999

The House of Rothschild: The World's Banker 1849-1999 by Niall Ferguson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This volume goes into even more detail than the first. It basically continues like that until the beginning of World War I, and sort of during the inter-war period, but then skims through the final decades. This was a bit disappointing to me, since I was curious to know more about recent years (at least until the 90s, since the book was written in 2000), and I got the impression he did this so as not to offend any members of the family who are currently alive, which doesn't make me feel good about the rest of the book.

However, that is just a minor quibble. The detail he goes into for the rest of the book basically means a detailed history of Europe and its economy throughout all those years. It is interesting to see how the Rothschilds changed over the generations, from strugglers to hustlers (in the entrepreneurial sense) to hard workers to aristocratic workers to idle-aristocrats (which was also important, since it let them mingle with royalty), back to hustlers, but in a more modern sense.

Some of my highlights:
"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)
"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)
- Despite France's reparations, it was Germany's finance that was brought to a standstill in 1873
"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)
Gustave's prediction in 1888: "Should the Emperor Frederick III die and his son Prince WIlliam ascend to the throne, there would be no change of policy as long as M. von Bismarck is alive and carries on' however, should he retire voluntarily or die, it is believed that nothing could then prevent Prince William from pursuing his warlike objectives and this would mean a world war." (P. 386)





View all my reviews