Who Were the Rich?

The works comprise a unique and original work which provides comprehensive biographical information on all 884 persons who left personal estates of £100,000 or more in Britain from 1809 to 1914, when these sources begin in a usable form. £100,000 is the equivalent of about £10 million today. Professor Rubinstein is the leading academic expert on wealth-holding in Britain over the past two centuries. For every person included, accurate information is given about his or her occupation or source of wealth, parentage and family background, education, marriage, children, and heirs, religion, political involvement, and land ownership. Virtually none of this information has ever been compiled before, and this work provides a unique, accurate, and realistic portrait of the wealthy elite in Britain during and just after the Napoleonic Wars. The picture which emerges is a surprisingly conservative one, with wealth centred not in the new industries of the Industrial Revolution, but in London, especially in the City of London, as well as in the landed aristocracy, in fortunes made in the east and west Indies, and riches derived from "Old Corruption," by government employees and placemen. The Introduction to this work provides useful summaries of the main trends. This set of volumes is of considerable interest to economic, social, and political historians, to genealogists and family historians, and to local historians and historians of local communities.