The House of Rothschild in Spain, 1812-1941

摘要

Lopez-Morell's book is a very detailed, finegrained narrative of the workings and withdrawal of one of the most prominent international financial houses in Spain during a crucial and often misunderstood period in the country's history. The house arrived in Spain in the wake of Napoleon's overthrowing of the Bourbon King in 1808, which triggered the institutional, political, fiscal, and monetary turmoil that reigned in the country until 1856, at least. As the book shows well, the hundred-or-so years in which Rothschild was vested in Spain were consistently a time of protracted political and macroeconomic volatility. From the 1890s, the house started declining; it first lost its assets in railways with the nationalist drive of the 1920s and Primo de Rivera dictatorship-though the mining investments in Rio Tinto and Penarroya survived well until the Great Depression.The fatal blow was the failure of its agent in Madrid in 1931-at a significant loss-in the onset of the disturbances leading to the Civil War. By 1941, the Spanish branch of Rothschild was greatly diminished and hurried to leave the country, sharing the fate of the larger family inflicted by rising anti-Semitism in other European countries. Nevertheless, Rothschild managed to liquidate the remainder of their businesses without complete losses under Franco's regime.