Rothschild family

The family descends from Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744—1812), who established a banking business at Frankfurt in the 1760s and served as court agent to the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. What distinguished him from earlier court Jews was not the scale of the business but that he managed to pass it on: in 1810 he renamed the Frankfurt firm M. A. Rothschild und Söhne and took his sons into partnership, and the five of them established houses at Frankfurt, London, Paris, Vienna, and Naples.

Those five houses were separate partnerships, not branches of one bank. They corresponded constantly, shared commercial intelligence, and took joint positions, but each held its own capital under its own name and contracts, and each came to its own end. Naples closed in 1863 and Frankfurt in 1901. Vienna's business was forced to an end by the Anschluss of March 1938, and the firm was placed under Nazi compulsory administration and sold in 1939. Paris was expropriated in 1940, restored to the family in 1944, and nationalized by the French state in 1981—82. Only the London house ran continuously, and it took the name Rothschild & Co in 2011..

The business-history literature holds that the Rothschild houses together constituted the largest bank in the world in the nineteenth century. Family capital was divided among descendants across successive generations, and present-day interests span financial services, real estate, mining, energy, mixed farming, winemaking, and philanthropy.

The family has been the subject of conspiracy theories for two centuries, and that body of claims is one of the foundational genres of modern antisemitism. Its common mechanism is to treat "the Rothschilds" as a single continuous actor with a single purse across two hundred years. This Atlas therefore records ten separate dated entities rather than one, and an attribution should always name the specific house and fall inside that house's dates.