the world of private banking

THE ROtHScHILD ARcHIVE 39
The Rothschild Archive at the beginning of the 21st century
Melanie Aspey
The fact that there are two names associated with this article now that it appears in
print is perhaps an early indication that changes have taken place at The Rothschild
Archive since this paper was delivered in 1998, changes which, it must be said,
we could not have envisaged at the time, not the least of which is the impact of
the Internet.
The Rothschild Archive: a Guide to the Collection finally appeared in 2000,
its route to press impeded slightly by increased demands placed on the archivists:
from the business, in support of current projects, including the transformation
of the Museum of London exhibition into a travelling display; and from the
academic community, in pursuit of the sources highlighted in Niall Ferguson’s
commissioned history, which he acknowledged to be ‘something of a research
agenda’. The guide was distributed to archives and libraries, users and donors to
promote the collection and to suggest the myriad subjects that might be fruitfully
pursued in the Archive’s London reading room. Accompanying the guide was a
card, asking recipients to register for printed updates that would be produced as
new material became available either through deposit or as the closure period was
relaxed. While more material has become available, not a single printed update
has been produced, for the simple reason that the guide appeared in the same
year as the Archive’s website was launched, and it is through this medium that
information about the collection has been disseminated.
In 1999 N.M. Rothschild & Sons transferred the Archive’s collections to The
Rothschild Archive Trust, an educational charity whose board consists of members
of the Rothschild family and outside advisers. The founding chairman of the board
was Emma Rothschild, daughter of Victor, third Lord Rothschild, who first opened
up the collection to the research community in 1978. As an independent body,
the Trust is well placed to attract deposits of records from every branch of the
Rothschild family, and has been successful in this part of its mission. The records
of the Viennese house were finally retrieved from the Moscow archives in 2001,
and in 2004 ownership of the records of de Rothschild Frères, on deposit with the
French Archives nationales since the 1970s, was handed to the Trust, thus uniting
in a legal if not a physical sense all known surviving records of the Rothschild
businesses. The fate of the business records of S.M. von Rothschild of Vienna,
N. Ferguson, The World’s Banker: the History of the House of Rothschild (London,
1998).
For an account of the records transferred from Moscow, see V. Gray, ‘The return of
the Austrian Rothschild archive’, in The Rothschild Archive’s Review of the Year 2001–2000
(2002). For a description of the archives in the Archives nationales’ Centre des archives du
monde du travail, see A. Sablon du Corail, J. Comble and M. Aspey, ‘Rothschild Reunited: