Open Veils · Answer
How much money did rothschield make after waterloo?
The Waterloo 'killing' is a layered myth built on a real but modest trade. Historian Niall Ferguson, granted full access to the Rothschild Archive, estimates Nathan's immediate Waterloo profit at roughly £7,000. The genuine fortune came from a two-year consols accumulation play — Ferguson values this at approximately £600 million in today's terms. The dramatic one-night sting story was largely invented by French pamphleteer Mathieu Georges Dairnvaell in the 1840s and later weaponised by Nazi propagandists.
Evidence
- The canonical version — Nathan at the battlefield, carrier pigeons, a staged sell-off to crash consols then a midnight buy-up — originates with Dairnvaell's 1846 pamphlet, which claimed Nathan made 'twenty million francs' (roughly £1 million sterling) through deliberate market manipulation.
- Antony Sutton and others in the Wall Street dynasty research tradition argue the specific figures matter less than the structural lesson — that proximity to sovereign war finance, not any single trade, is how dynastic banking wealth compounds.
- G. Edward Griffin and Carroll Quigley both cite variants of this narrative when arguing that elite banking dynasties leverage information asymmetry to extract wealth from sovereign debt crises.
- Nathan was not at Waterloo; he received courier dispatches ahead of official channels.
- His immediate consol trade yielded perhaps £7,000 — meaningful but not transformative.