The Omission of the Rothschild–Sassoon Relationship
Ferguson says virtually nothing about the relationship between the Rothschild family and the Sassoon family, who became the dominant figures in the East Asian opium trade.
By the 1870s, the Sassoons had established a near monopoly over the opium trade between India and China, making them the second wealthiest Jewish family in the world after the Rothschilds. Furthermore, the Sassoons were both blood relatives and business partners of the Rothschilds, yet Ferguson does not address this relationship at all.
David Sassoon modeled his own family after the Rothschilds, strategically employing his eight sons throughout the China opium trade. In 1887, Edward Albert Sassoon—the grandson of David Sassoon and son of Albert Sassoon—married a daughter of the Rothschild family. As a result, the Sassoons, long nicknamed "the Rothschilds of China," literally became relatives of the Rothschild family.
In addition, Arthur Sassoon, another son of David Sassoon, married Louise Perugia, the daughter of Signor Achille Perugia. Achille Perugia's sister, Marie Perugia, had married Leopold de Rothschild. Consequently, Arthur Sassoon also married into a family connected by blood to the Rothschilds.
Arthur Sassoon remained particularly close to the Rothschild family, ultimately dying on March 13, 1912, while staying at the home of Leopold de Rothschild in Leighton Buzzard. Over many years, the Sassoon and Rothschild families also jointly sponsored and established numerous Jewish synagogues.
The Rothschild Network and Its Relationship with the House of Morgan
Although Ferguson repeatedly discusses instances in which the House of Morgan and the Rothschild family cooperated, he avoids making what I regard as the crucial observation—that they were, in practice, partners.
The Rothschilds' American representative was George Peabody & Co., and Morgan himself was a partner in that firm. Yet Ferguson passes over even this basic point without directly addressing it.
J. P. Morgan, together with his French business partner Anthony Drexel, met James Rothschild in 1869. After the Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871, Morgan, with James Rothschild's assistance, ultimately succeeded in recovering both the principal and interest on the French government bonds in which he had invested, despite France's enormous postwar debts.
Later, during the American financial panic of 1893, the Rothschilds and Morgan jointly provided capital to support President Grover Cleveland's administration.
During both the First and Second World Wars, Morgan—backed by Rothschild support—issued the majority of the Allied governments' war bonds. Likewise, the establishment of the Federal Reserve System in December 1913 was, in my view, the product of a Rothschild-Morgan cartel.
(The creation of the Federal Reserve originated in the secret meeting held on Jekyll Island in 1910. That gathering was effectively an alliance of the Rothschild, Morgan, and Rockefeller financial interests.)
There are numerous examples of cooperation between the two. During the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Morgan and Rockefeller cartels also played major roles on behalf of the Rothschilds.
Nevertheless, Ferguson portrays the relationship between the House of Morgan and the House of Rothschild as being closer to one of competitors than genuine partners.
Similarly, Ferguson treats many firms that were, in effect, part of the broader Rothschild sphere—such as Schroders, Morgan, Guaranty Trust, Morgan Grenfell, Société Générale, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, Lazard, Warburg, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and the Sassoons—as though they were simply independent corporations, offering only a superficial discussion of their relationship with the Rothschild banking house.
In my view, analyzing the Rothschild family itself is important, but equally important is identifying in detail the syndicate of institutions associated with the Rothschild network. Only then can one more clearly understand how the Rothschild cartel shaped nineteenth- and twentieth-century world history.
Because Ferguson focuses almost exclusively on the Rothschild family itself, he gives me the impression that he ultimately failed to capture the full scope of the Rothschilds' vast network.
Ferguson expresses surprise that until Natty Rothschild's death in 1915, the Rothschild bank continued using the outdated single-entry bookkeeping system, recording only cash receipts and payments, and that double-entry bookkeeping, which also records the causes of transactions and credit accounts, was introduced only after 1915.
From my perspective, however, various circumstances suggest that the Rothschild family may well have maintained a second set of books for a very long time.
In particular, considering the long-standing relationship between the Rothschilds and the Morgan family, it is quite possible that a substantial portion of the Rothschilds' investments in the United States—held through intermediaries such as Belmont, Peabody, Morgan, Warburg, Schiff, and Harriman—was concealed through double bookkeeping.
When J. P. Morgan died in 1913, his estate was valued at approximately $118 million (roughly $49 billion in today's dollars, or about 58 trillion won). Yet his direct rival, John D. Rockefeller, possessed an estimated $900 million in 1913 (equivalent to roughly $409 billion today, or about 490 trillion won, representing around 2 percent of U.S. GDP at the time).
Morgan, who was generally regarded as Rockefeller's equal in wealth, officially possessed only about one-eighth of Rockefeller's fortune.
It is even said that Rockefeller remarked at Morgan's funeral:
"He owned all of us and he wasn't even that rich."
The implication is striking. It is highly possible that the House of Rothschild held and managed a substantial portion of the ownership interests associated with the House of Morgan.
Selective Treatment of the Rothschilds' Twentieth-Century Influence
While explaining the stature of the Rothschild family during the nineteenth century, Ferguson argues that their financial scale and influence were comparable to the combined power of today's Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and even the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
However, although Ferguson describes in considerable detail the immense influence the Rothschild family exercised over Europe and the wider world during the nineteenth century, his account gives the impression that he deliberately minimizes their influence beginning in the twentieth century.
For example, in the chapter titled "The Military-Financial Complex (1906–1914)," Ferguson notes that from 1897 onward the Rothschild family became a major shareholder in Vickers, Britain's largest arms manufacturer at the time, and exercised significant influence over the company. He therefore acknowledges the family's close connection to the era's military-industrial and militaristic developments. He also points out that Natty Rothschild strongly supported the expansion of the Royal Navy.
Nevertheless, Ferguson does not mention that Basil Zaharoff—the Vickers executive who became notorious for encouraging rival Balkan states to arm themselves against one another and who ultimately played a significant role in creating the conditions that led to the outbreak of the First World War—possessed enough influence to hold detailed discussions with British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau regarding both the conduct and conclusion of the war. In discussing Vickers, Ferguson omits what many would regard as one of the most important aspects of the story.
Instead, Ferguson portrays the Rothschild family primarily as victims of the First World War. He argues that the war forced them to pay extremely high taxes, destroyed the gold standard they had long supported, dramatically reduced the capital of the Rothschild bank—leaving it smaller than Baring and Schroders—and completely severed their relationship with German banking houses represented by the Warburg family.
However, several additional considerations deserve attention. The high wartime taxes were, in fact, policies that Natty Rothschild himself had advocated. The gold standard was restored after the First World War. Although the Rothschild bank's own capital may have declined, profits from Rothschild-controlled enterprises—particularly the arms manufacturer Vickers and mining companies such as De Beers and Rio Tinto—increased during the war. Moreover, the Warburg family continued to function as a loyal allied financial group of the Rothschilds and reportedly remained aligned with them even during the Russian Revolution of 1917.
One thing is clear: behind the First World War stood the Rothschild family—at least in part, as Ferguson himself partially acknowledges.
Questioning the Narrative of Rothschild Decline After World War I
If, as Ferguson argues, the Rothschild family truly began to decline after the First World War, and if the Great Depression of 1929 and the end of the Second World War dealt them a devastating blow, then one must ask how they were still able to help establish the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in 1930 with the assistance of the House of Morgan, and how they continued to influence the five London gold-fixing banks from 1919 to 2004, setting the global price of gold from New Court in the City of London.
(One of the decisive reasons the Rothschild family secured control of South African mining interests through Cecil Rhodes and De Beers during the 1890s was to maintain the global gold standard centered on Britain. By 1898, South Africa accounted for approximately 25 percent of the world's gold production.)
Likewise, considering that members of the Rothschild family reportedly served for many years on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group, established in 1954, this too could be seen as evidence that the Rothschilds did not simply disappear after the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War.
Limited Coverage of Victor Rothschild and the Postwar Era
Ferguson devotes very little space to the activities of the Rothschild family after 1915, particularly after 1945. In fact, the post-1945 period receives the least coverage of any section in the entire work. He also gives only minimal attention to Victor Rothschild, whom former KGB spy Yuri Modin identified as the "fifth man" who allegedly wielded influence over British, American, Soviet, and Israeli intelligence services. (*Taken together, the discussion amounts to fewer than three pages.*)
Ferguson notes that Victor recruited Anthony Blunt, a member of the Cambridge Spy Ring, into MI5, and that members of the Cambridge Spy Ring regularly gathered at Victor's house on Bentinck Street for meetings and discussions. However, Ferguson presents Victor less as the group's leader than as one of its victims.
According to Ferguson, Victor had no idea that his Cambridge associates were Soviet spies.
Even if Margaret Thatcher's government officially rejected the espionage allegations against Victor—who had served as an adviser to the government—I am not sure how many people would accept such an implausible explanation at face value. After all, Victor was widely regarded in his own day as a man of exceptional intelligence, making it difficult to believe that he could have been so thoroughly deceived by his spy "friends."
In any case, Ferguson deliberately distances himself from every form of conspiracy theory and writes a conventional work that contains only material acceptable to mainstream academic historians. It is, in every sense, the official biography of the Rothschild family.
The Absence of the Bilderberg Group from Ferguson's Account
Likewise, Ferguson makes no mention whatsoever of the claim that Victor Rothschild, with Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands serving as its public figurehead, helped establish the Bilderberg Group in 1954 as a kind of world government. In fact, the word "Bilderberg" does not appear anywhere in the book.
For reference, the officially recognized founders of the Bilderberg Group were Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, the husband of Queen Juliana, and Joseph Retinger, who had earlier helped establish the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), an organization that contributed to the foundations of what later became the European Union.
Prince Bernhard also had close connections both to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the forerunner of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—and to IG Farben, the German industrial conglomerate that played a major role in supporting Nazi Germany and has been associated by some authors with Rothschild-linked business interests.
Max Warburg, who served as a director of IG Farben, was also a business partner of the Rothschild family.
Prince Bernhard himself had previously been a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and worked at the Paris office of IG Farben.
Another link frequently drawn between Victor Rothschild and Prince Bernhard is Royal Dutch Shell, the Anglo-Dutch energy company. Victor Rothschild and Prince Bernhard have both been reported to have been shareholders in the company.
Conclusion
Here, I am reminded of the Nietzschean, Kafkaesque, E. H. Carr–inspired, Andy Warhol–like, David Lynch–like, and broadly postmodern way of thinking expressed in the statement: "There are no facts, only interpretations."
Ferguson's biography of the Rothschild family can be seen as a classic illustration of Jacques Derrida's famous proposition that "there is nothing outside the text" (il n'y a pas de hors-texte).
To say that there is nothing outside the text is to say that everything is ultimately contained within the text itself, and that an infinite variety of interpretations becomes possible depending on the intentions of both the author and the reader.
Ferguson's own intentions as an author, the Rothschild family's intentions in authorizing and publishing the biography, and the broader political and sociological context of the Anglo-Saxon world at the time the book was written all intersect to produce a work that is simultaneously factual and not entirely factual, positivist yet not wholly positivist—a text situated within a complex web of contexts.
Of course, as Derrida himself argued, this is ultimately the nature of every text.
Nevertheless, Ferguson's biography is a work in which these broader social and historical contexts exert an especially strong influence.
Loading comments...