Volume 46, Number 20 · December 16, 1999
Family Values
By Robert Skidelsky
The House of Rothschild: The World's Banker, 1849-1999
by Niall Ferguson
Viking, 658 pp., $34.95
The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets, 1798-1848
by Niall Ferguson
Penguin, 518 pp., $18.95 (paper)
In his delightful memoirs, the art historian Kenneth Clark recalls that Lord Cunliffe, governor of the Bank of England, came to lunch with his father on August 2, 1914. 'There's talk of a war,' said Lord Cunliffe, 'but it will never happen; the Germans haven't got the credits.' Almost a century earlier Gutle Rothschild, widow of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, is supposed to have said of a dispute between England and Prussia, 'It won't come to war; my sons won't provide money for it.' Niall Ferguson's extraordinary book is both a history of the world's most powerful banking dynasty and an attempt to understand the role of high finance in an international system about which such statements could be made and be believed.
Review, 4915 words
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