The House of Rothschild; The World's Banker 1849-1999

New York: Viking, 1999. First American Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xxx, 658 pages. Illustrations (some with color). Tables. Family Tree. Appendix I: Exchange Rates. Appendix II: Selected Financial Statistics. Source Notes. Bibliography. Index. Black mark on bottom edge. Niall Campbell Ferguson (born 18 April 1964) is a Scottish historian who has served as the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and as a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard, the London School of Economics and New York University, a visiting professor at New College of the Humanities and a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. Ferguson writes and lectures on international history, economic and financial history and British and American imperialism. He is known for his positive views concerning the British Empire. He once ironically called himself "a fully paid-up member of the neo-imperialist gang" following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Ferguson has been a contributing editor for Bloomberg Television and a columnist for Newsweek. He began writing a twice-a-month column for Bloomberg Opinion in June 2020. Ferguson has written and presented numerous television documentary series, including The Ascent of Money, which won an International Emmy award for Best Documentary in 2009.[9] In 2004, he was named as one of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. This is the second volume in the acclaimed history of the legendary banking dynasty, which chronicles the changing fortunes of the financial family during a turbulent era in world history, from their dramatic influence in nineteenth-century Europe to their gradual decline because of the failure to establish a sixth house in the world financial center of New York. Ferguson wrote two volumes about the prominent Rothschild family: The House of Rothschild: Volume 1: Money's Prophets: 1798-1848 and The House of Rothschild: Volume 2: The World's Banker: 1849-1999. These books were the result of original archival research. The books won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and were also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award. The books were widely acclaimed. John Lewis Gaddis, a Cold War-era historian, praised Ferguson's "unrivaled range, productivity and visibility". Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm had praised Ferguson as an excellent historian. A reviewer for The Economist described how many regard Ferguson's two books on the Rothschilds "as one of the finest studies of its kind." Writing in The New York Review of Books, Robert Skidelsky praised Ferguson: "Taken together, Ferguson's two volumes are a stupendous achievement, a triumph of historical research and imagination. No serious historian can write about the connection between the politics, diplomacy, and economics of the nineteenth century in the same way again. And, as any good work of history should do, it constantly prompts us to ask questions about our own age, when once again we have embarked on the grand experiment of a world economy without a world government. "Derived from a Kirkus review: In a thorough, diligent study, Ferguson completes his grand chronicle of the family that achieved history's greatest economic hegemony. Access to family records, hitherto unavailable, was facilitated by the English branch of the clan for this monumental authorized history. Ferguson makes their engrossing story an advanced seminar on the financial history of Europe. The Rothschilds practiced geopolitics on a grand scale. They arranged the tricky reparations following the Franco-Prussian conflict, were active in securing Suez for Victoria, and managed assets for the Vatican. They demolished social barriers erected against Jews, hobnobbing easily with aristocracy and royalty, dealing with the likes of Disraeli and Gladstone, Lloyd George and Cecil Rhodes, Napoleon III and Bismarck. They ultimately joined the nobility themselves, purchasing castles and art in prodigious quantities. By the turn of the last century and the advent of the fifth generation, however, there was a decline in the Rothschilds' fortunes. They had neglected to establish a foothold in the New World. Virulent anti-Semitism and two world wars left the family enterprises no more important than those of their numerous competitors.