I’ve read half a dozen books that mention the Rothschild windfall from scooping up cheap bonds sold by investors who had been duped into believing that Wllington had been defeated by Napoleon;s armies at Waterloo. I just finished “False Economy” by Alan Beattie who has a master’s degree in economics from Cambridge and and has been world trade editor of the Financial Times since 2004. . On page 194 he state: The story is largely a myth(the news actually came from newspaper reports in Brussels" (not from a carrier pigeon or Rothschild spies as I’ve read in other books)…and the Rothschilds lost money through miscalculating the brevity of the war)"
Beattie seems credible. I look forward to your feedback on Beattie’s version.
davidmich
The “duping” part of the story seems to be a myth, added by later anti-semetic and anti-capitalist authors. There wasn’t any effort by the Rothschild’s to misreport the outcome of the battle.
But a lot of the story is true. The Rothschild made large amounts of money financing the British in the Napoleonic wars. And they did develop an elaborate network of messengers to bring news from the Continent (which did include carrier pigeons, but I don’t think they got the Waterloo news specifically through pigeons), and Nathan R. did here about the outcome of Waterloo before the British gov’t did. A little later, the British gov’t would actually end up relying on the Rothschild communication network rather then their own diplomatic service for international news.
IIRC, Ferguson kind of equivocates on whether the R’s actually ended up making money off Waterloo specifically. They invested poorly going into the 100 days, expecting it to take a lot longer to defeat Napleon the second go-around, so the immediate aftermath of the battle was a disaster for them. But then they also bought a lot of British bonds, which increased in value after the war, and so in the longer term they made a lot of money. So depending on how much of their bond position you want to attribute to Waterloo versus their wider relationship with the British gov’t, you can probably argue either way for how the battle affected their finances.
…makes it very clear how he miscalculated the length of the war, bought an enormous amount of gold which was to have been used by Wellington’s army to fight Napoleon’s forces. But instead Rothschild ended up sitting on gold that he couldn’t use and would lose value. So he bought up British bonds. The bond market soared. He cashed in after a year and made a fortune.
davidmich