[Music] In 1875, one of the most important business transactions in the history of the modern world took place. The European age of imperialism was just entering its most aggressive phase. Over the next three decades, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain would swallow up virtually the entirety of Africa into colonies. Britain, of course, already had a great empire, the centerpiece of which was the British Raj, an immense territory covering modern-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Yet, it faced an issue. After many decades of theorizing about how it might be done, French companies had finally succeeded in building a canal that ran through the western side of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt and created a waterway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. No longer would Europeans need to sail all the way around Africa and across the Indian Ocean to get to Asia. This was of especial importance for the British as it would drastically reduce the length of time taken to send ships to and from British India. They wanted in on the Sewish Canal. It would take money and this was where the NM Rothschild and Sun Banking House in London stepped in. They gave Benjamin Israeli's conservative government a loan of4 million pounds, hundreds of millions of dollars in today's money, in order to purchase a very large stake in the Sewish Canal Company. 7 years later, Britain would establish a protectorate over Egypt and secure its control over the Sewish Canal region. The entire episode points towards the centrality of the Rothschild banking family in financing the European age of imperialism and conquest and the expansion of the British Empire, the influence of which spread much much further. This is the story of the Rothschilds and the enormous banking and financial empire which they came to rule over. The Rothschilds would only begin to appear as one of the great banking and financial families of Europe towards the end of the 18th century. Their lineage though can be traced back considerably further to at least the 16th century. The family were Jewish and so they might well have ultimately come from somewhere like France or England, two kingdoms which had expelled their Jewish communities in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. The arrival of the black death or bubonic plague in Europe in 1346 and the horrors it had visited on the continent with one in three people dying in many places over the next decade had been blamed on the continent's Jewish people in many places with paranoid claims of wells being poisoned by local Jews and the like emerging. This combined with the earlier expulsions had seen many European Jews traveling eastwards to places like Germany and Poland. It is unclear if the Rothschilds were one such migrant family as the family surname does not give a clear idea of their provenence. It derives instead from the term shilt which transliterates as at the red shield. This could mean that they lived near or operated an inn that bore a red shield on its frontage. The family's coat of arms for centuries, as they became successful bankers, bore a red shield, too. Evidently, they were involved in loaning out money in western Germany by the late 17th century. This was one of the few sectors of the economy Jewish families could prosper in. As usury, the practice of loaning out money at high rates of interest was forbidden for centuries under Christian law. Incidentally, the Jewish decision to resort to usery as a means of making money would feed into a lot of modern anti-semitic tropes in Europe. While the Roth's childs were clearly involved in money lending in the city of Frankfurt by the 18th century, the individual who really started the family's ascent to wealth and power was Maya Amshell Rothschild. To get a sense of how his success came about, we need to look at exactly where capitalism had developed to and what the economy and financial world of Europe was like in the 18th century. Capitalism per se is a relatively modern phenomenon, but the idea that one makes a profit from an enterprise and then reinvests the profits or accumulated capital into another initiative which in turn creates more money is as old as time. The oldest writing system in the world, ununiform, was basically developed in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium B.C. as a means of recording on clay tablets who owed whom for bushels of grain, jars of wine, and the like. Commerce has always been the lifeblood of civilization, but this had become more sophisticated over time. Coins had been produced by the Greeks and Romans. And by the time we get to late medieval Italy, there were banking houses who extended letters of credit to people in other cities, verified by wax seals, that proved the authenticity of their bills and letters of exchange. It was then that capitalism emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries. It did so in a very small regional area, basically a triangular trade between London, Antworp, and Amsterdam centered on the cloth trade. Borses, the low country's name for what we would call a stock exchange, emerged first in the cities of Bruge and Antworp. London and Amsterdam followed the pattern in the second half of the 16th century. Around the same time, merchants in these cities began forming what are known as joint stock companies whereby individuals would invest in trading expeditions. Finally, the Dutch East India Company and the English India Company, what would be called the world's first corporations were set up in London and Amsterdam in600 and602. Here were all the instruments of capitalism emerging. banks, stock exchanges, corporations, and the ability to invest speculatively in companies. While all of this signaled the beginning of capitalism to an extent, Europe did not become a capitalist continent overnight. Throughout the 17th and most of the 18th centuries, the prevailing economic orthodoxy across the continent was the concept of mercantalism. This held that there was a finite amount of world trade. The overall amount of it could not be grown and therefore each nation had to compete with others to acquire a larger slice of the pie. So for instance, the most profitable trade in the world at the time was importing spices like pepper, nutmeg, and cinnamon from the East Indies to Europe. Powers like England, the Dutch Republic, and the Portuguese believed that they had to muscle their opponents out of these markets, and so their ships ranged around the waters of the East Indies, attacking each other. It really occurred to them that they could all prosper if they convinced enough native rulers in what is now Indonesia to trade with all of them. By the mid 18th century, just as the Rothschilds began to emerge onto the European banking scene, this orthodoxy was changing. Adam Smith had published his the wealth of nations in 1776 outlining the basics of modern capitalist theory and countries and people were becoming more and more aware that European wealth could be increased exponentially not by fighting with one another but by developing new markets and increasing the overall production of commodities. All of this required capital and investment provided by bankers and financiers. The Rothschilds would soon become the most successful bankers of this new age of capital. As noted, the real founder of the Rothschild banking empire was Maya Amshell Rothschild. He was born in the city of Frankfurt on the 23rd of February 1744. At the time, Frankfurt was a free imperial city. This meant it was like an independent city state like Monaco or Singapore are today. There were dozens of these free imperial cities across Germany. Frankfurt was an especially important one on account of its size, population, economic fingerprint, and because it had long established itself as the center of a significant European bookf fair that continues down to this day. Meer's father was a relatively prosperous businessman in the city. He dealt in commodities and also loaned money out, including to local German rulers. They were far from wealthy though. The Rothschild family at the time was very large when extended members are included and the home was cramped with over two dozen residents at various times. When he was just 13 years old, young Mia was sent off to the city of Hanover in northwestern Germany, an independent prince electorate state that was controlled by the Hannavarian kings of England. There he was apprenticed to Simon Vulf Oppenheimimer, a fellow Jewish financier who was one of the main bankers for the government of Hanover. Meer remained there for 6 years before returning to join the family business in Frankfurt in 1763. Over the next 20 years, he turned out to be a very accomplished banker and financier. He loaned out money to a number of powerful German rulers and aristocratic families at good rates that enriched the family. Then when the land grave of Hessa Castle, one of the large German states that elected the Holy Roman Emperors of the day was succeeded to by William the 9th in 1785. He hired Meer to manage his financial affairs. The land grave was enormously wealthy and merited considerably from his patrons laress. More importantly, it meant that when the European political situation was turned on its head a few years later, Meer was sitting on top of a mountain of German money that he was in charge of managing. In 1789, after decades of financial mismanagement, the French government of King Louis V 16th had been forced to convene the estates general, the French equivalent of Parliament for the first time in 175 years. Soon the government lost complete control of events, and the estates began organizing the government into a kind of new constitutional monarchy. The French Revolution became more radical over time. eventually leading to the foundation of a French republic and to the murder of the king and his Austrian-born queen Marie Antuinet. The Austrians were appalled and led the way in convincing other major European powers like Prussia and Britain to wage war on the French revolutionaries. The French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars that followed lasted from 1792 down to 1815. Many German states were involved to varying extents, including the land grave of Hessa Castle. As the manager of his patrons money, Mia was able to loan out the extensive wealth that William the 9th held at advantageous rates to the belligerent powers, notably the governments of Austria and Prussia. Later Napoleon Bonapart became emperor of the French and conquered most of the continent, Germany included. Even this presented an opportunity for Rothschild and his family. As Napoleon attempted to impose a continental trade embargo on his bitterest enemy, Britain, one known as the continental system, Mia became a tradesman who facilitated illegal smuggling of goods in and out of the continent using his wealth and connections. By the time the Napoleonic Wars ended, Mer had been able to amass a fortune based on his various methods of exploiting the wartime crisis. Germany would remain the core branch of the Rothschild banking operations throughout most of Meer's life and for a few years thereafter. They became powerful figures within Frankfurt and were even able to dampen the anti-semitism that was rising everywhere again in Europe in the 19th century. For instance, in 1811, all local laws in Meer's native Frankfurt against Jewish people were lifted and they were given the same rights and liberties as any Christians in the city. Despite being primarily based out of Germany, they were also becoming international financiers by this time. While Napoleon's continental system had been uninforcable and the British had eventually won the wars against France, it had lost hundreds of billions of dollars in today's money to do so, maintaining large fleets at sea, fighting a bitter war over half a decade in Portugal and Spain, launching failed expeditions to the low countries and much more besides. All of this needed money which even rich British banks and merchant companies like the English East India Company were not always willing to provide. The Rothschilds had stepped in. This occurred most notably at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon made the disastrous decision to invade Russia in the summer of 1812. At first, he won spectacular successes and had captured Moscow by the mid-autumn, but the Russians refused to engage him in combat or surrender. The Russian winter set in and Napoleon fled back towards Poland and Lithuania. His army devastated in the process. It was at this crucial juncture, as a new panuropean alliance formed to defeat the French, that Meera's sons spread out to Europe's capitals and began providing millions of pounds in loans to the governments of Britain and other countries, sums equivalent to several billion dollars today. This not only created immense goodwill towards the Rothschilds once the wars ended in 1815, but the Rothschilds also had advanced information about military developments and used it to their advantage in offloading bonds and loans or buying others, what we would effectively call insider trading today. By the time the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, Maya Rothschild was dead. He had passed away in 1812. Just as news was arriving to Frankfurt that Napoleon and Lag Grande were descending on Moscow. The business was therefore in the hands of his sons as the war ended and during its aftermath. Highly successful businesses that are passed from generation to generation within families can run into trouble. A founder can be an immensely talented individual who makes a great success of his enterprises. Then it can be handed over to irresponsible and untalented children who run the business into the ground or spend money excessively. Luckily, Mia had raised his sons to run things very well after he left the world. As the Napoleonic Wars were entering their final stage, the five sons divided up the business and set up new branches around Europe. The five arrows, as they are often termed, involved maintaining the core branch in Frankfurt and setting up four new ones in Paris, London, Vienna, and Naples. Am Michelle Rothschild, the eldest son, remained in Frankfurt to run the core business there. Nathan, the third of the sons, headed for London and set up a branch in the capital of the country, which was now fully expressing itself as the global superpower of the 19th century. Carl went to Naples and James Mayer Rothschild, the youngest of the five boys, was sent off to Paris. They were men of varying capabilities. What they benefited hugely from initially was manipulation of the bond market. Buying up government debt at cheap prices in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and then selling it off for considerable profits as the postwar reconstruction turned into a period of renewed prosperity in the 1820s. While each of the branches of the Rothschild banking family would meet with their own levels of success, it was the new branches in Paris and London that would transform the Rothschilds from successful bankers into one of the pillars of the world of international finance in the 19th century. Take the French branch for example. Jacob or James Mia, the youngest of the sons of Maya Amshel, was sent to Paris when he was just 20 years old to oversee the family's affairs there. This alone gives an indication of the opportunism of the family. The Rothschilds had been bankrolling Britain for years in its wars against the French and at the very same time they were helping finance Napoleon's audacious efforts to defeat the Russian Empire and claim further lands in Eastern Europe. from Paris. He supported the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy after Napoleon's downfall and set up Bon Deutschild's Frra, the Bank of the Rothschild's brothers in 1817. It oversaw a lot of the family's financial activities and lending in Western Europe. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the new French government was determined to begin industrializing. It perceived that Britain, a small island nation, had been able to defeat Napoleon's grand continental empire because of the strength of its industry and navy. Therefore, the 1820s saw a rapid expansion of industrialization in France, particularly in northern cities like Leil. James Rothschild's Parisian banking house provided a lot of the seed capital for these efforts. Similarly, when the Flemish and Woon people of the southern low countries revolted against Dutch rule in 1830 and successfully established the independent nation of Belgium, the French Rothschild banking branch stepped in to become the chief financier to Belgium's first postindependence king, Liupold I. The entire effort points towards their role as monopolists as well. By entering the Belgian market aggressively and buying up Belgian bonds, the Rothschilds acquired an outsized role in Belgium's economy which they held for decades thereafter as this became a major hub of the industrial revolution on the continent. The London branch was even more important. Britain had already begun to establish itself as the foremost global power in the 18th century. The English East India Company had conquered India and the first penal colonies had been founded in Australia in the late 1780s. All of that was eclipsed by what happened in the 19th century. Singapore was established in 1819. Hong Kong was taken from the Chinese in the early 1840s. New Zealand was settled at the same time. The Cape Colony had been taken from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars and by the 1880s a chain of colonies from Egypt to South Africa was being created. This made the British government wealthy. But even in the 19th century, governments were only ever able to achieve as much as those who loaned money to them would allow. Nathan Rothschild was in London as early as 1804, financing the Napoleonic War effort there. Even as his brothers provided money to Britain's enemies there, he bought up government bonds, loaned out money, and financed British debt in a way which would have been damaging for the Rothschilds if the British had not ultimately defeated the French. When the British won, the bonds and other financial instruments the London branch of the Rothschilds held skyrocketed in value. On top of all that, Nathan had couriers who conveyed news of the joint Anglo-Russian victory at the Battle of Waterloo over Napoleon on the 18th of June 1815. Faster to him than to many British politicians. Nathan's stock market activity in London in the hours that followed understandably opened the family up to criticism of enormous fraud and market manipulation. This was just the beginning of the manner in which the Rothschilds expanded their affairs in England. For one, they began buying up huge amounts of gold at a time when the gold standard was still well and truly in operation. This being the idea that banknotes and lines of credit should only be extended by national banks relative to the amount of tangible wealth a country had in the form of gold and other commodities. Nathan Rothschild was the great figure in the development of the British branch. In the mid 1820s, he was rich enough that he made sizable loans to the government as it faced a short-term liquidity crisis. Years later, he was also involved in managing the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. The ban on slavery was only achieved by placating the wealthy and powerful plantation owners of the British colonies in the Caribbean and assuring them that they would be compensated by the government in return for freeing the hundreds of thousands of slaves found across their plantations in the Caribbean. Nathan loaned the government a chunk of the money which allowed them to bring about the end of slavery in 1833. By the time he died, he probably accounted for around one out of every 160 in the British economy and his sons continued this success in Britain. As we saw at the commencement, it was the Rothschilds who loaned the money to Israel's government which allowed Britain to acquire a large stake in the sewers canal. In the interim, the Rothschilds had played a role in the railway boom of the 1830s and 1840s that connected much of Britain with trains. While by the 1850s the government was not just borrowing money from the Rothschilds but employing their technical expertise in the management of the Royal Mint. Soon members of the British Rothschilds were sitting in Parliament and no British racehorse meeting was complete without a champion horse from one of the Rothschild studs. Things developed in much the same way on the continent and before very long all the branches of the family were acquiring noble titles. In 1822, Emperor Francis I of Austria in recognition of the role the Rothschilds had played in financing the wars against the French and the postwar reconstruction of Europe decided to award the title of fry hair to each of Maya Amsel's five sons. Amil, Solomon, Nathan, Carl, and James. There was a certain irony to this given the manner in which the family had helped finance Napoleon's military campaigns as well. The title of Fryhair essentially made all five brothers baronets in the German aristocracy. It was a peculiar arrangement in many respects as the brothers did not hail from the Austrian lands and the Holy Roman Empire that the Austrian Habsburgs had been emperors of for centuries had ceased to exist during the Napoleonic Wars. Later members of the family were granted honorary Austrian citizenship while honors were accumulated in other countries too. For instance, members of the French branch of the family were granted the Legion of Honor. It was in Britain, though, where the Rothschilds acquired their most significant titles. Anthony Rothschild was made a baronet here in 1847, a lower rank of the aristocracy. It was not until 1885 that a full baronial title was granted when Nathan Roth'schild became the first Baron Rothschild. As these titles were awarded in different countries, the family names changed ever so slightly. Where previously they had simply been the Rothschilds, different branches began using noble particles before their surname depending on the country. Thus, some German Rothschilds became Fon Rothschild or D Rothschild in France, all indicating aristocratic bearing. Not every venture went well for the Rothschilds. Back in 1821, as the Napoleonic Wars had come to an end, and Europe was returning to normality after a quarter of a century of conflict, Carl Maya Rothschild had been sent to Italy to set up a branch of the family business in the Kingdom of the two Sicilles. Italy had been divided into dozens of city states since medieval times. These had been consolidating into larger states over the centuries in a process which mirrored Germany. The largest one geographically by the 19th century was the kingdom of the two Sicilles which basically covered all of southern Italy south of Rome and the island of Sicily. It was ruled over by a branch of the French royal house of Bourbon. The Austrians were seeking influence here as they controlled much of northern Italy around Venice and the plane of Lombardi. When the Rothschilds arrived to Naples to set up a banking operation there at the start of the 1820s, it was partly as a fifth column to support Austrian interests in the south of the peninsula. Thus, for several decades here in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, the Rothschilds were attempting to utilize their banking activities and wealth to influence the politics of Naples and the lands it controlled. The Burbon rulers were more than aware of the designs of the Rothschilds. Yet they often needed their financial support anyway to rule over a kingdom that was already becoming one of the poorest parts of Western and southern Europe. In the end, it was wider European developments which brought the Rothschild's influence in southern Italy to an end. The second war of Italian independence of 1859 was quickly followed by Jeppi Gibbaldi's expedition of the 1,000 to Sicily. In a miraculous campaign throughout 1860, he conquered the kingdom of the two Sicilles and Italy was broadly unified under the rule of King Victor Emanuel II of Sardinia. The Rothschilds, tainted by their connections to the Austrians, found it difficult to maintain a strong presence as financiers in Italy thereafter. The demise of the Naples business was a minor blow when compared to the manner in which the family prospered and influenced events elsewhere. For instance, they played a role in the emergence of Brazil as an independent nation. Brazil had become a colony of the Kingdom of Portugal as a result of the Treaty of Torresas all the way back in 1494. The Portuguese paid little attention to this giant landmass and its dense rainforest for two centuries until a gold rush began there in the 1690s. Over the next century, millions of Europeans and African slaves arrived to the country. And when Napoleon occupied Portugal in 1807, the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil and lived in exile for several years. The Napoleonic Wars had seen independence movements emerge all across Spain's colonial empire, and countries like Chile, Mexico, Argentina, and Peru gained their independence. The Brazilians were anxious to do so, too, but in a more peaceable way. The country became independent in 1822. However, as the split with Portugal was acrimonious in many ways, it left the Brazilian government in a precarious financial situation. Nathan Rothschild stepped in with a sizable loan, one which helped to balance Brazil's books and also permitted the new Brazilian state to pay a large amount of compensation to Portugal for the loss of their colony. Portugal acknowledged Brazil's independence and war was avoided. The Rothschilds acquired interests in Brazil thereafter. It was one of dozens of such ventures and as the 19th century went on, various branches of the family also expanded aggressively into sectors like publishing, mining and insurance in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna and other cities. There are no shortages of examples of how the Rothschild's wealth and power influenced events over the course of the 19th century. A striking instance is the Crimean War. The war was fought between October 1853 and March 1856 between the Russian Empire on one side and a coalition of the Ottoman Turks, the British, the French, and the Kingdom of Sardinia on the other. The Russians and the Turks had been intermittently at war with one another going back to the middle of the 16th century, fighting nearly a dozen wars in total over four centuries. Russia's victories had become more and more devastating over time. And by the middle of the 19th century, there was the very real risk that not only would Russia become the dominant power in the Black Sea, but that it might capture huge chunks of Ottoman territory in the Balkans and the Caucuses. The British and French consequently joined with the Turks in this war to prevent further Russian expansion. Most of the fighting concentrated on the Crimean Peninsula after Anglo French expeditionary forces were sent there. This was an expensive undertaking, one which the British government financed by taking loans from numerous banking establishments. The Rothschilds were happy to do so. Part of this was owing to Russia's growing anti-semitic policies where the pale of settlements had been established as a line running from around modern-day Latvia in the north to Ukraine in the south east of which Jewish people within the Russian Empire were effectively banned from settling. In this particular case, Lionel Rothschild entered into the loan for broadly ideological reasons and was never fully reimbursed. The wider Crimean War ended in a bit of a stalemate, but the British and French had achieved their goal in slowing Russia's expansion. The Crimean War loans were really more like a piece of Rothschild philanthropy. They were opposed to the growing anti-semitism of the Russian Empire, which incidentally would lead to the flight of hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews from the Russian Empire in the decades that followed. This was far from the only initiative where the Rothschilds used their wealth for truly honorable ends. In the middle of the 1840s, a new fungus had arrived to Europe on board the first generation of steam ships. Previously, it could not survive the Atlantic passage. But with the trip now only taking eight or nine days, the fungus arrived to Europe and began devastating the continent's potato crops. This had truly appalling impacts in some places like Poland and Ireland that had become overly reliant on potatoes as a cheap staple crop. The great famine, as it became known in Ireland, claimed well over a million lives and led to a wave of migration out of the country. It has also been argued that a huge black mark on the British government's legacy is that while people starve to death around the country, other food stuffs were still being exported from Ireland for profit. The Rothschilds became the primary financiers of the British Relief Association that was set up to provide relief to the poor between 1846 and 1848, the worst period of the famine. When the potato blight hit Scotland, it worsened the economic situation that was already underway there because of the Highland clearances. Again, Lionel de Rothschild stepped in and put his money where his conscience was, providing extensive financial support to the Highland and Island immigration society, a group that provided financial assistance to Scots of the Highlands and the Outer Heedes who wanted to move to the Americas, Australia, or New Zealand in search of a better life than they now had in their native country. Many other examples of the selfless philanthropy of the Rothschilds in the 19th century could be cited. As with any famous family or dynasty that maintains prominence in society over decades or centuries, the Rothschilds threw up eccentric characters. Undoubtedly the most peculiar was Walter Rothschild, a member of the London branch of the family. He was born in the British capital in 1868. On the surface, he was a perfectly normal man with a traditional career. He was part of the London banking firm and also entered politics sitting as an MP for the constituency of Ellbury between 1899 and 1910 as a member of the Liberal Unionist Party a branch of the Liberals that split from the main party over the issue of home rule and the status of Ireland within the United Kingdom. He served for a time in the army reserves and later in his life he would play a significant role in liazing with the government about its policy towards the British mandates in the Middle East and the potential creation of a Jewish state in the Levant after the British took over the governance of the region from the Ottoman Empire at the end of the first world war. But where Walter really was a bit peculiar was when it came to his interest in zoology. He studied the subject in his youth while attending Cambridge University. For the rest of his life, he spent much of his own slice of the family fortune, amassing hundreds of thousands of animal specimens, many of which he had stuffed. The Rothschild natural history collections contained millions of items by the time he died, and many species were named after him. Parts of this bordered on the bizarre. There is a photo extant today of Rothschild riding on top of a giant tortoise. While surely the most eccentric episode was when he hitched up a team of four zebras to a carriage and directed them out to Buckingham Palace in an effort to demonstrate to the public that the African animals could be domesticated in much the same way horses had been thousands of years ago. Unsurprisingly, the use of zebras as carriage horses didn't catch on. The Rothschilds were not just bankers. As their wealth grew, they branched out to become involved in all kinds of different industries. The wine trade is an instructive example. Beginning in 1853, Nathaniel Rothschild acquired a number of different wine shadows in France. Soon other members of the family became interested and by the end of the 1860s the Rothschilds had acquired a substantial place within the French industry, notably Shat Muto and Shat Lefit. The irony of this is that they entered the French wine industry at the worst time humanly possible. The advent of the steam ships in the 1840s had not just brought the potato blight to Europe. It also allowed for the arrival of the aphid that carried the Philoxera virus. Something which over a number of years absolutely destroys vineyards. Thus, the Rothschilds became involved in the French wine trade just as vineyards all over France were beginning to rot away and die. It would take until the 1880s before the solution was found by grafting American vine rootstocks onto the vines of European grapes, providing immunity in the process from philoxer. Many French wine makers lost everything as the wine trade collapsed in the 1860s and 1870s. It's a sign of the wealth of the Rothschilds that they not only survived but managed to expand their presence. To this day, the Rothschilds continue to play a major role in the wine trade around the Bordeaux region of southwestern France and Chatau Lefit is one of the world's most iconic wine shadows. There are times in modern history when governments and pillars of the financial world turn in desperation to others for loans. For instance, during the panic of 1907, an economic crisis which hit the United States early in the 20th century, the Wall Street stock market was so badly impacted that JP Morgan had to step in with a consortium of bankers to stabilize the market. In 2008, Layman Brothers and other banks turned to Warren Buffett and other investors to try to acquire emergency liquidity to save their financial houses. Buffett refused after examining their books. In the 19th century, the Rothschilds were the port of call in Europe. The Austrian government was in big trouble financially by the mid 1860s. After the series of revolts that struck Europe in 1848, Hungary had very nearly acquired independence from Austria. The government in Vienna responded by effectively placing Hungary under military occupation from 1849 onwards. This combined with the cost of wars in northern Italy and eventually the Austrussian War meant the Austrian government was nowhere near able to meet its day-to-day spending. The Rothschild stepped in on several occasions to give the government in Vienna millions of pounds worth of loans to remain afloat. This continued beyond the Austroprussian War of 1866. The loans could not be repaid and eventually having exhausted all other options the Austrian government agreed to end the occupation of Hungary in 1867 and the Austrian Empire was transformed into the dual monarchy of the Austrohungarian Empire. It's a sign of how central the Rothschilds were to not just European finance but the continent's politics at the same time. A few years later, the Rothschilds were also involved in the reconstruction of Paris. After its successive wars against the Danes and Austrians in the 1860s, the Prussians had gone to war with France in 1870 and managed to unite most of the German states, barring Austria, into a new German Empire. Paris was laid siege to in the midst of the Francoressussian War and the city was left devastated in 1871. The Rothschilds were one of the main backers of the new Republican government which not only managed to rebuild Paris in the aftermath of the war, but turn it into the cultural capital of the continent. All the while, the French branch of the family was also acquiring a huge stake in industries such as the French railway system. that was spreading out from Paris to connect the whole of the country. The foremost new business engagement of the family, however, in the late 19th century was its involvement in the diamond mining industry in southern Africa. The British colonies around the Cape along with the Boer colonies and various native Zulu kingdoms had been in conflict with each other for decades through the middle of the 19th century. What really changed matters was when huge diamond and gold mines were discovered in the Kimberly region. Ceil roads is most closely associated with the development of British colonial strategy across the south of the continent thereafter. But the Rothschilds were actually the largest investors in what became the Debeers mining company. For a time in the late 1880s and through the 1890s, the beers was one of the most important companies on earth. One which controlled the world diamond trade and also played a huge role in the gold trade and the development of what became the union of South Africa. Both the London and French branches of the Rothschilds invested massively in the company and acquired great riches as a result. The next time you think about the diamond trade in late 19th century South Africa, remember that Cetile Roads was the face of it, but the Rothschilds bankrolled it. The Rothschilds were Jewish and as a prominent Jewish banking family, especially in Britain, they began to favor a range of Jewish causes with their money. In the second half of the 19th century, there was a major resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe around this time, fueled in part by the growing scientific racism of the age, which tried to argue that Caucasian Europeans of Germanic and Nordic heritage were inherently superior to other races. In other areas, it focused on tropes about Jewish people trying to run Europe and the world from behind the scenes using their wealth and power. Unsurprisingly, the Rothschilds became common targets of this growing anti-semitism. As it escalated, the idea of creating a Jewish homeland back in the Levant, which the Jewish people had been driven from over a period of centuries, owing to persecution by the Babylonians, Seucids, Romans, and Arabs, emerged. Alfons Rothschild, the senior French member of the family, was an especially keen supporter of the Zionist movement as hundreds and then thousands of Jewish people from Europe began to settle in the Holy Land, which at the time was still ruled by the Ottoman Empire. Another family member, James Jacob de Rothschild, financed the creation of one of the first major Zionist settlements in what would later become Israel, Rishon, a southern suburb today of Tel Aviv. Most of the Rothschilds would never move to the Holy Land, but they did use their wealth to buy up land from either the Ottoman government or local Arab and Palestinian landlords in order for new Jewish settlers to live there. The family also played an active role in the Jewish colonization association. Decades later, after Israel was founded in the aftermath of the Second World War, Rothschild family lines of credit helped in part to finance the construction of the Israeli parliamentary buildings, the Knesset and the Supreme Court building. The golden age for the Rothschilds really came in the decades when Maya Amshaw was the patriarch of the family in the late 18th century and then in the subsequent two generations as his sons and grandsons spread out to Vienna, Paris and London. As we have seen, there were always setbacks such as the collapse of the Neapolitan branch in the middle of the 19th century. However, the last quarter of the 19th century brought an unprecedented level of difficulties. The French branch of the family, for instance, lost a lot of money during the so-called long depression that struck the world economy between 1873 and 1879. Added to this, they had attempted to invest heavily in the emerging petroleum industry. As oil began to replace both coal and whale oil for a wide range of industrial processes, Alons Rothschild started the Caspian and Black Sea oil company and was very successful at first. Thereafter, it ran into steep competition from John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Elements of the bank in France also suffered reverses as stock market crashes occurred in the 1880s. The one project which the family had the good sense to stay away from was the Frenchbacked plan to cut a canal through the Ithmas of Panama to cut the naval voyage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to a fraction of the current time. The project ran into decades of problems, much of it caused by the tropical diseases which the region abounded in. This did not prevent the Rothschilds in France becoming an ever larger focus of anti-semitic tropes and theories in the decades leading up to the first world war. Particularly so during the long-unning Drafus affair in France between 1894 and 1906 when the Alsatianborn Jewish French army officer Alfred Drafus was falsely accused of passing secrets to the government of the German Empire. The interwar period brought fresh opportunities and very considerable challenges. Parts of Europe lay in ruins at the end of the First World War, especially northeastern France and parts of Belgium, while revolutions tore apart many countries as old empires collapsed in 1918 and 1919. The Rothschilds were in a position to offer lines of credit to various governments. The governments of the new countries which emerged in central Europe, Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were especially grateful for their lines of funding, although the Czech divisions of the bank were effectively nationalized by the new government in Prague. Then came the boom years of 1924 to 1929, followed by the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed it. The Rothschilds were absolutely central to one of the key moments in the crisis in Austria. All the way back in 1855, they had been one of the primary investors into the newish credit anala. Anelm Salomon from Rothschild was in many ways the founder of that bank. This had subsequently become known as Credit Anstelt Bank. In 1931, it became the epicenter of the European financial crisis associated with the Great Depression. The bank had overextended itself in the 1920s, buying up smaller banks. In 1931, it made an announcement that it would be unable to publish its financial statements for the previous year, triggering a huge run on the bank's deposits. In the end, despite the efforts of several members of the Rothschild family to find additional lines of credit to keep the bank afloat, Credit Anstalt was broken up into several subsidiaries, some of which were further nationalized. The collapse of Credit Anstalt was a factor in the growing anti-semitism flooding Europe in the interwar era. Fascist parties like the Nazis in Germany used the fact that the bank was a prong of the Rothschild financial and banking empire to support their conspiracy theories about the Jewish people running Europe and the world in malevolent ways through their role in world finance. The rise to power of the Nazis in Germany early in 1933 endangered everything the family had built up over more than a century and a half. They became an especial focus of the Nazi propaganda surrounding Jewish involvement in world finance and clandestine political activity. This was exemplified in the release in 1940 of Drothjilts, a German feature film that reimagined an earlier American produced film on the family, though one which presented them in a much more negative light. The family suffered during the war. Many members already lived in London and were relatively safe there. But as the Germans expanded to take over most of the continent from March 1938 onwards, their business and banks were taken under state ownership. One member of the family, Louis Nathaniel de Rothschild, the head of the operations of Vienna, was arrested after the German annexation of Austria in March 1938. He was kept under house arrest for months, though he survived the war and most members of the Austrian branch of the dynasty had absconded over the border into Switzerland in advance of the Nazi occupation. The Austrian Rothschilds had their wealth, property, and possessions seized by the government. As late as the end of the 1990s, the family was still trying to reacquire a series of valuable paintings which had formed part of Louis Nathaniel's art collection before he was arrested. The Rothschilds rebuilt after the war. They were no longer quite the banking powerhouse that they had been. In part because the new western world order after the Second World War was dominated by the United States. Whereas the family's main businesses had been in Western and Central Europe, there would be other issues. In 1981, the Socialist government of France Mitoon in France decided to nationalize Rothschild's FRA, one of the major French branches of the family businesses. This was offset to some extent by a decision to amalgamate some of the French and British businesses in the aftermath of the war. Ultimately, the Rothschilds became more diversified. For instance, the family's earlier investment in the French wine industry bore huge dividends in the postwar era as wine drinking became something which grew more and more popular in countries beyond the more traditional Mediterranean wine consumers in France, Spain, and Italy. Chat Lefit Rothschild is understood to be worth upwards of €4 billion alone as a business today. Much of the dynasty's business interests are now held in trust as large shareholders of companies they acquired a stake in or set up in the 19th century. Rothschild and Co. SACE, for instance, operates jointly out of London and Paris with nearly€20 billion worth of assets and over a hundred billion under management. The Rothschilds are not as ubiquitous throughout modern society as they once were. To have mentioned the Rothschild family in London in the 1890s would have been to make reference to a group of financiers who were synonymous with the British Empire and all elements of British industrial and commercial life and their influence extended across other countries as we have seen. Everyone knew the name Rothschild. The same cannot be said some 130 years later. Some people still know the Rothschild name, but it is a long time since the family was viewed as being at the very heart of global finance and power. No one would have heard Jacob Rothschild, fourth Baron Rothschild prior to his death in February 2024 being discussed in the same vein as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or Bernard Arnol. The perception is that the Rothschilds are a financial juggernaut of the past, but this is not entirely true. The Rothschilds are a little bit like the Vanderbilt dynasty in America. For a time in the middle of the 19th century, Cornelius Vanderbilt was probably the wealthiest man in the world before his wealth was widely dispersed among generations of the Vanderbilts. The same holds true of the Rothschilds. There is no one member of the family today who holds hundreds of billions of dollars. But members of the family continue to hold vast sums of money and substantial stakes in companies ranging from mining operations like Debeers and Riotinto to many others. The accumulated wealth of the Rothschilds when you add up the various branches of the family today is a subject of both speculation and conspiracy theories. When everything is accounted for, the Rothschilds still probably hold hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wealth. Though internet speculation that the dynasty commands trillions of dollars fits more into the realm of speculation than hard facts. The Rothschild banking dynasty are one of the most significant banking and financial families in the history of the modern world. Some people might be unaware of exactly who they are or what they have done over the centuries, but very few people are not at least vaguely aware of the Rothschild name and the fact that the family are synonymous with high finance. This story is a remarkable one in many ways. It all began with Maya Amshel Rothschild getting a leg up as a financia in western Germany in the second half of the 18th century. As with all great success, pure luck played a major role thereafter. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars provided opportunities for the family to make money. They did so very shrewdly by betting on both sides. Members of the family were in both London and Paris offering loans to the British government and Napoleon right up until the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. After the wars, they continued to expand and were some of the largest providers of capital to European governments and businesses during one of the most important eras of human history when the age of imperialism, the first age of globalization, and the advent of the second industrial revolution transformed the world, often with Rothschild financing behind it. And yet, like all the enormously wealthy individuals who achieved so much success during this period, the Rothschilds felt they had a responsibility to give back and use their wealth and power for the greater good. whether in trying to shelter their fellow Jewish people from anti-semitism in Europe or provide poor relief to the Irish and Scots when the potato famine and the Highland clearances caused such suffering in those regions in the 1840s and 1850s. The Rothschilds operated with a social conscience. They are still very much around, though operating in a far less obvious manner today than they did a century and a half ago. When one looks to understand the expansion of the world in the second half of the 19th century and the advent of global industry, banking and trade, they are in many ways looking at the story of the Rothschilds, a banking and financial dynasty that shaped the modern world to a huge extent. What do you think of the Rothschild family? Were they one of the most dynamic and successful family of bankers in the world? Or were they very lucky in terms of the manner in which their immense wealth was initially built up because of the Napoleonic Wars? Please let us know in the comment section. And in the meantime, thank you very much for watching. [Music] [Music] Yeah. Yeah. [Music] [Music] [Music]