Guido Alfani

The rich, like the poor, are always with us. In fact, over many centuries – as this wide-ranging and ambitious book tells us – the richest in society have captured more and more of the overall wealth of Western societies. Since the time of classical Greece, as empires have risen or fallen, their fortunes and the power which goes with them have grown and grown. Only the Black Death of the 14th century and the two world wars of the 20th have checked or reversed the trend – and only then for a time. It has always resumed. In modern times, neither the recession following the 2007-08 financial crisis nor the Covid pandemic have dented the apparently inexorable upward movement in the wealth of the rich and ultra-rich.

Guido Alfani, an economic and social historian at Bocconi University in Milan, deftly interweaves stories of individual and family wealth into his narrative. There is Alan Rufus, a companion of William the Conqueror, who controlled the staggering amount of more than seven per cent of the national income of England and was perhaps the richest man – other than monarchs – who ever lived in Britain; Elon Musk could not aspire to such wealth. Then there are the Medici of Florence, the Fuggers of Augsburg, together with the wealthy of the Netherlands, France and, overwhelmingly in recent decades, Americans: Andrew Carnegie, the Rockefellers, John Pierpont Morgan (who in 1907 single-handedly stopped the collapse of the American financial system) and most recently the tech billionaires.

The core of the book, however, is an analysis of how these men (and they were almost all men) built and maintained their fortunes, why they did so and what their societies thought of their achievements. Throughout two millennia most of the rich have been rich because of inheritance. They had rich fathers or uncles; the prime examples are nobles, closely associated with royal dynasties. There have been periods when great fortunes have been made, such as the opening up of Atlantic trade in early modern times and the second industrial revolution of the late 19th century, but those who made their wealth then are small in number compared to the recipients of inheritances. In such periods, predictably, merchants, entrepreneurs and financiers typically sought to use their new-found riches to try to insert themselves into the older elites – and to pass on their wealth to their children and grandchildren.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Roderick Floud is the author of An Economic History of the English Garden (Allen Lane, 2019).… (meer)