The Rothschild family builds Europe's first truly international bank starting in the late 18th century, and historian Niall Ferguson traces how five brothers spread across Frankfurt, London, Paris, Vienna, and Naples turned a single banking house into a continent-spanning financial network. Ferguson lays out the mechanics: coded letters, a private courier system faster than most governments', and bond deals that financed wars and reconstructions alike, including Britain's campaign against Napoleon. Emperor Francis II grants the Austrian branch hereditary baronies in 1816; Queen Victoria later backs the British branch's elevation to nobility. By the 19th century the family is said to hold the largest private fortune the modern world has seen, built less on secrecy than on information moving faster than anyone else's. Ferguson follows the money into politics, showing how loans to finance ministers and monarchs bought access to the era's biggest statesmen. The film treats the Rothschilds as bankers who became indispensable to the states they lent to, and asks what that kind of leverage actually looks like in practice.