Industrial AgeEconomy & Trade
Nathan Rothschild and the Waterloo bond story
1815NotableContested
Nathan Rothschild, who sent gold to Wellington for the British government, learns of Waterloo by letter on 21 June 1815. An 1846 pamphlet invents a huge market coup; research finds modest gains at most.
Contested history
Consensus: Nathan Rothschild did help finance Britain's war and did get early private news of Waterloo, but the story that he made a vast fortune by trading on it began in an 1846 antisemitic pamphlet and is rejected by historians.
Rothschild financed Britain's war effort and shipped gold to WellingtonEstablished
From January 1814 the commissary-in-chief J. C. Herries engaged Nathan to buy gold on the Continent through his brothers and deliver it to Wellington's army, as Rothschild Archive records and Herbert Kaplan's research show.
Wartime government business made the family's riseEstablished
Niall Ferguson and Kaplan show that the bullion and subsidy contracts of 1814 and 1815 lifted N M Rothschild into the front rank of London finance, ahead of the family's later loans to European governments.
He had early, but not exclusive, news of the victoryEstablished
Brian Cathcart traced it to a letter from Ghent that reached Nathan on 21 June 1815, before the official dispatch arrived that night, though at least one other Londoner had heard first.
He made a vast fortune trading government bonds on the newsDebunked
Ferguson calculated that even large purchases on the news would have earned little, about 7,000 pounds at most, and that the war's sudden end left the brothers holding depreciating gold; Cathcart concludes he made at most a modest profit.
He faked a panic by selling, then bought at the bottomDebunked
This detail first appears in the 1846 pamphlet by 'Satan' (Georges Dairnvaell), which claimed twenty million in one coup; no record from 1815 supports it, and bond prices had begun recovering before the battle.
The tale is an antisemitic myth that grew over timeEstablished
After the 1846 pamphlet it was retold in antisemitic writing and in the 1940 Nazi film Die Rothschilds: Aktien auf Waterloo, as Cathcart's study for the Rothschild Archive documents.
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Learn more ranked by votes
Documentrothschildarchive.org
Nathan Rothschild and the Battle of Waterloo, by Brian Cathcart (The Rothschild Archive) ↗Editor's pick
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Review of Kaplan, Nathan Mayer Rothschild and the Creation of a Dynasty (EH.Net) ↗Editor's pick
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Review of Cathcart, The News from Waterloo (Times Higher Education) ↗Editor's pick
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The News from Waterloo: The Race to Tell Britain of Wellington's Victory ↗Editor's pick
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Nathan Mayer Rothschild and the Creation of a Dynasty: The Critical Years 1806-1816 ↗Editor's pick