In 2016, the publisher De Gruyter released an essay by Rainer Liedtke titled “Agents for the Rothschilds: A Nineteenth-Century Information Network[1].”
Drawing on the Rothschild Archive London — correspondence from over one hundred business agents working for the various Rothschild houses — Liedtke documented a recruitment and intelligence operation that spanned the European continent and reached into Latin America for most of the 19th century.
The paper describes a system in which agents were placed in locations where the Rothschild banks did not maintain a permanent presence. These agents carried out business transactions, gathered political and economic intelligence, and forwarded information that enabled the family to make decisions ahead of competitors and, frequently, ahead of even governments.
Liedtke notes that what we now would consider insider trading ‘was commonplace in nineteenth-century finance and part of the salary package of employees of financial institutions’. The agents were not merely tolerated in this practice — they were compensated through it.
The recruitment criteria tell their own story. Trust was paramount, and two principal routes existed for earning it: being a relation of the family, or having worked within one of the houses for a considerable period. Marriage was the preferred option, and these marriages ensured that important business locations were ‘covered in the long run by trustworthy representatives’.
Liedtke is explicit about one boundary:
… such men never gained access to the decision-making circle of the family but instead maintained their own business interests separately, albeit profiting significantly from contacts to the Rothschild network.
The agents were operationally essential, but they remained permanently outside the core. Only born Rothschilds were fully trusted. The ‘quintessential criterion’ for whether a Rothschild bank existed in a given city was whether a Rothschild was willing to move there.
He also documents a deliberate policy of heterogeneity. Despite being Jewish, the Rothschilds employed non-Jewish agents as a matter of strategy. A homogeneous network, Liedtke explains, would be ‘self-referential’ — limited to the social circles its members already moved in.
Diversity of background expanded the network’s reach into drawing rooms, ministries and trading floors that a uniformly Jewish network could not access. Agents sent to locations where they had no prior ties were valuable precisely becausethey lacked local loyalties — their ‘foreignness’ meant their primary allegiance remained with the principals abroad, uncompromised by existing relationships in the places where they operated.
Liedtke records a shift over time in what the principals expected. In the early decades, the network’s value lay in raw market data — commodity prices, exchange rates, shipping movements. After the telegraph commoditised this kind of information in the mid-nineteenth century, the agents’ importance shifted towards strategic political assessment: who was likely to form a government, which minister could be cultivated, what policy was being contemplated before it was announced.
Only one vulnerability recurs in the archive. August Schönberg, dispatched to New York and later known as August Belmont, declared himself the Rothschild agent on Wall Street without authorisation. The distance between New York and London made control impossible. Belmont could not be dislodged, and the family was forced to tolerate an agent who had, in effect, gone rogue.
Liedtke treats Belmont as the system’s one significant failure.
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