Calendrier du 15 novembre 2023
Economic History Seminar
Du 15/11/2023 de 12:00 à 13:30
R1.09
NOBLE Aurelius (LSE)
The Persistence of Aristocratic Wealth: Institutional Measures, Family Measures and Social Mobility, 1858-1907
This article examines persistence in the wealth of title-holders in England and Wales between 1858 and 1907. While the historical narrative is that this elite was unable to weather the shocks of globalisation, industrialisation, and democratisation, I find that this group was highly persistent. This paper makes a number of methodological contributions, by linking the population of individual wealth-holders with genealogical data on the population of title-holders. This allows me to distinguish between two measures of title-holder wealth, which I term the family measure and the institutional measure, and to measure title-holder specific social mobility. The family measure tracks the wealth of the families that constituted this elite at the beginning of the period, whereas the institutional measure also includes new entrants. This method shows that persistence was stronger when considering new entrants (institutional measure) than just the initial families (family measure). The apparent decline of British title-holders (Cannadine, 1990) was predominantly about changes to the composition, rather than a decline in wealth. Title-holding families were subject to a different, lower, social mobility regime, where they declined towards a higher level than the population mean. The results indicate a social, rather than economic, mechanism for persistence. The paper illuminates the long-run trajectory of a social elites, and their relation to social, economic and institutional forces. Estimating these different measures is made possible by the construction of a new individual level dataset, containing the population of English and Welsh wealth-holders (2.2m), combined with genealogical information on the population of title-holders (1.4k deaths, 4.5k living), and individual data on the population of deaths (26.1m).