Any attempt to illuminate the history of Mayer Amschel Rothschild and his descendants is fraught with peril. The stories already planted by historians and others about what may have been the most important family in European finance during the nineteenth century are legion. Moreover, these stories are ground well-overgrown by hardy weeds of myth, themselves well-fertilized by the constraints of available archival sources. With Nathan Mayer Rothschild and the Creation of a Dynasty, however, Herbert H. Kaplan, professor emeritus of history at Indiana University, avoids the perils. The volume will be valuable not only for his fellow Rothschild scholars but for anyone with an interest in the financial history of the Napoleonic period or in the development of nineteenth-century financial institutions.

Kaplan dispels various Rothschild myths, such as the long-standing one that had Nathan supplementing his business capital with the dowry of his wife, Hannah Cohen (pp. 9–10). He also offers a method for separating myth from actual history within the context of an extremely complicated network of business relationships. Though he admits the book is neither a biography of Nathan nor a history of the Rothschild family (p. xx), making its title a slight misnomer—Creation of a Dynasty: Nathan …, 1806–1816 might be more accurate—Kaplan's approach may be far more valuable than either. Painstakingly piecing together sketchy details from personal and business correspondence, Kaplan takes us transaction by transaction through the decade that saw Nathan Rothschild progress from a merchant whose character contemporaries viewed as questionable to a banker at the center of a financial network vital to British political and military success. He teases out one new detail after another from previously unresearched archives on both sides of the Channel, most notably from the Rothschild Archive and the John Charles Herries Papers at the British Library.

By themselves, Kaplan's new sources make the book worthy of an extended look. Even more important, however, is how Kaplan illuminates these sources. Nathan Mayer Rothschild was a man who regularly eschewed careful bookkeeping. Indeed, relatives and associates complained throughout to Nathan about sloppy, contradictory, even ethically suspect, records. Moreover, the decade saw him involved in a dizzying number of partnerships, associations, and “arrangements” with his father, brothers, and associates. Kaplan, however, shows the accounting instincts of a tax auditor as he follows and reconstructs Nathan's transaction trail. And as the trail leads from days where Nathan was mistrusted by almost everyone in Manchester, through years of establishing his reputation by successful specie and bullion smuggling, to the late Napoleonic period where Nathan and his brothers interacted multiple times a day with major players in war finance such as Herries, the British Commissary-in-Chief, one gains new insight into the family's success.

What of negatives? Had I had Professor Kaplan's ear when he was completing the final draft, I would have made two suggestions. First, and more importantly, I would have asked for a book 25–30 pages longer. The book seems too short, not because it contains too little information but because it contains so much. Stories of accounting and finance by their nature require great precision in both quantitative and verbal diction, and Kaplan is a very precise writer. Generally, the book flows quite well—unlike the typical tax auditor, Kaplan is good at making the technical part of the story accessible. Occasionally, however, his precise diction turns dense, assuming more technical understanding than his intended audience may have. The book's introduction and conclusion are outstanding in outlining his argument, but a reader—particularly a nonspecialist, or one whose understanding of how the record-keeping underpinning the income statement and balance sheet actually works might be a bit sketchy—may occasionally get bogged down in other parts of the book. Adding a page or two here, a paragraph or a sentence there, of explanation—connecting the particular details to a larger balance sheet story or a supply and demand/agency costs story, say—would have made the detail more accessible to those of us less adept in “following the money trail.”

Second, a list or diagram of dramatis personae would have helped. “Keeping the names straight” can daunt nonspecialist readers; so, preceding his text with an annotated list of the players in the story would have been as helpful to them as his six-page list of abbreviations will be for specialists using his voluminous endnotes. Similarly, a summary diagram or three setting out the various Rothschild and Rothschild-connected partnerships would have been invaluable: as Kaplan shows, the network of Rothschild business associations, even between 1806 and 1816, was complex indeed.

Be clear, however, this is an important book. In telling the story of Nathan Mayer Rothschild it is tempting to succumb to one of two hackneyed stories. One can point to the amoral, even unethical, opportunist. Nathan was not a man who mellowed between 1806 and 1816; he remained willing to disregard anything and everything (careful record keeping, the law, the good opinion of father, brothers, or associates) that got in the way of the success of his business. Or one can tell the story of an entrepreneurial risk-taker, a person who saw opportunities better than everyone else and then focused all his attention on building networks to take advantage of these opportunities. But though each caricature may contain part of the story, Kaplan's work here makes clear that it is only a small part. The history of the Rothschild dynasty remains a story with many complexities unexplored. Nathan Mayer Rothschild and the Creation of a Dynasty provides us with a model for further exploration.