The House of Rothschild. Money's Prophets 1798-1848 and The World's Banker 1849-1999. Volumes I and II.

Ever since the Rothschild's spectacular rise to preeminence in European finance during the last, turbulent years of the Napoleonic wars, a mythology has grown up around the family and it's firms. It is no exaggeration to say that the Rothschilds became 1 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 5 Jewish brothers born into the wretchedness of the Frankfurt Ghetto could rise by their own ingenuity to become ' the worlds bankers' - dominating the international financial markets, rubbing shoulders with the social elite, patronizing 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.