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First complete history of the Rothschild banking dynasty, with access to worldwide archives. From the Rothschilds’ spectacular rise to pre-eminence in European finance during the turbulent final years of the Napoleonic Wars, a mythology has grown up around the family and its firms. It is no exaggeration to say that the Rothschilds became one of the living legends of the 19th century: the personification of a new era in which money determined status and power, an era in which five Jewish brothers born into the wretchedness of the Frankfurt Ghetto could rise by their own ingenuity to become ‘the world’s bankers’dominating the international financial markets, rubbing shoulders with the social elite, patronising the great artists and architects of the era, and above all exerting a decisive, if veiled, influence over the world’s monarchs and statesmen. Using a wealth of archival sources as well as a vast amount of little-known contemporary and more recent secondary literature, Niall Ferguson’s definitive study will finally hold the mirror of reality up to the face of myth. The result promises not only to do justice to the history of the Rothschilds, but to revolutionise the history of their rise and pre-eminence, and to reveal fascinating continuities from the 19th century to the present day.