The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild.

FERGUSON, Niall.

Item Number: 47011

London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998.

First British edition of Ferguson’s monumental history of the Rothschilds. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page, “For John ‘All bands have histories- only the Rothschilds, however, have a mythology.’ Niall Ferguson.” Near fine in a near fine dust jacket.

Ever since the Rothschild's spectacular rise to preeminence in European finance during the last, turbulent years of the Napoleonicwars, a mythology has grown up around the family and it's firms. It is no exaggeration to say that the Rothschilds became 1 of theliving legends of the 19th century: the personfication of a new era in which money determined status and power, an era in which 5 Jewish brothers born into the wretchedness of the Frnakfurt Ghetto could rise by their own ingenuity to become ' the worlds 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.