What happened when the rich stopped intermarrying in Britain
axios.com
axios.com
Even if such a blip of an event were to have an effect, it would surely happen on a generational timescale (20-30 years) rather 5-7 years later. These peerages are quite literally generational inheritances of titles - you don't suddenly become a lord after getting married.
>...
>Constituencies that were no longer represented in parliament by the local peer were much less likely to oppose the introduction of state education
Women of the peerage take lower class husbands, sullying their family name. Their brothers lose their bids to enter parliament to people outside the peerage. Critically, those outsiders support educational reforms.
I'd be curious to know why the peers seemed to be willing to support outsiders over peers who had sisters with "poor taste" in men. Wouldn't such snobs prefer their own kind, however tarnished, over outsiders? Then again, the bitterest feuds are within families or between religions that are barely distinguishable from one another. Perhaps total outsiders were vastly preferable to peers who were letting their class down. If true, the peers own snobbery bit them in the arse.
This was relatively rare though and most peerages would never have legally passed to women. Especially if the woman had a brother, the peerages that could have, would have passed to their brothers instead.
> Their brothers lose their bids to enter parliament
afaik at that time, if you had a peerage with the right to enter the house of lords, you could go at any time.
I can imagine a scenario that could fit here. The woman's marriage to a poorer man caused a break up of the estate as a dowry which left her brothers less well off and unable to afford the social standing to acquire peerages in their own name. Her brothers, plural, can't all inherit a peerage, only one of them could. Likewise if her brothers planned to enter the House of Commons. Or maybe her husband chose to represent the location? The way the article is worded it feels like there is a confusion between the House of Commons and House of Lords.
It's also possible the conclusion is just a non sequitur and the marriages of the rich women to poorer men had nothing to do with state education and this was just a correlation.
Only the eldest brother would sit in the House of Lords and only after their father died. It was very common for a son due to inherit a peerage to go in to the commons before they inherited their title. Once a title was inherited one could only sit in the House of Lords until Tony Benn.
Still, it fails to mention the Reform Act 1867, passed by a traditionally landed Parliament and which substantially increased the franchise; it is this change that can be thought to have had at least some causal role in decreasing the proportion of members of great landowning or squire families among Members of Parliament from nearly 66% in 1866 to 58% following the 1868 general election;[0] the Commons that passed through the Education Act 1870 was thus still mostly drawn from the traditional landowning class.
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1750-0206...
The 1860s were probably the high water mark for British power in the world, but as for weird things that chnaged all that try this one:
- Frederick Tudor created the ice industry (think what the hero from Frozen did), allowing storage of buffalo and cattle beef in trains and ice houses in chicago
- which travelled by boat through the great lakes and over the recently dug Eerie canal and out New York and across the Atlantic to cause world wide economic depression as agricultural societies collapsed due to the competition
- which meant traditional MPs and rural power was upended
- and new industrialists coukd afford to pay their politicians while the landed gentry found there was a massive rural depression
There are so many fascinating threads through history.
But transport by water is roughly two orders of magnitude cheaper than (pre railway) land transport - see also acoup.blog on Land Trains and game of thrones for a interesting segue.
Also the industrial revolution itself seems more likely to cause education reform than changing peers, who are lifetime appointments. Fewer hands needed in agriculture, plus more jobs requiring people to be able to read means you need kids in schools instead of on farms.
It's probably true that prestige went down. It takes a long time for that sort of thing to change. There are still people around today who are impressed by titles.
It seems very unlikely that the elites would not fight tooth and nail for the best matches for their kids. Not having the queen around makes no difference, it seems most likely there would still be a scene where people went and made connections, and the criteria would be largely the same.
The main parties in English politics of this period were between the Liberal party (which was a fusion of old Whigs and new radicals) and the Tori/Conservative party which was aligned with nobility. One of their main disagreements was whether the mass populace should be "advanced" through welfare or whether they should be left to their traditional roles and rungs in society.
Many bourgeoisie who had gained their wealth through the early industrial period joined the Whigs and they left a tradition which brought many of the next generation into the Liberal party. This of course aligned with their own interests. A healthy and educated workforce was critical to their ambitions. Though I do think in general they were motivated by a certain amount of ideological good will.
The Tori and Conservative parties in England did not just oppose state welfare. They often opposed industrialization as it was the foundation of their opponents' power and it creates potential for shifts in the roles of individuals in society.
Interestingly this creates a persistent confusion to this day wherein Americans don't understand why the "conservative" party in England is not 1:1 a party for business as it is in America. As they have a historical interest in opposing some development and supporting conservation.
I was of the opinion that British conservatives at the time viewed state welfare as a form of noblesse oblige. Burke and Disraeli both argued for a paternalistic state in which every man was made to serve others for the sake of Empire, Church, and State.
Furthermore, it is not as simple either as saying that the Tories "aligned with nobility". The Whigs were a very aristocratic bunch — just look at the government that passed the Reform Act 1832.[0] In fact, the Whigs enjoyed greater support among the high aristocracy: "Among the very greatest landowners, those who held at least 10,000 acres worth at least £10,000 per year, the proportion of Liberals increases."[1] Overall, the divide between the Tories and the Whig element of the Liberals in the 19th century can be hard to nail down or understand precisely because it doesn't easily correlate with any one factor, such as religion (they were nearly all Anglican, but some had sympathy for nonconformists), social origin (they were largely drawn from landowners, but there were various ranks among them) or ideology (although things tended to be more clean-cut there — there's a reason nonconformist industrialists sided with the Whigs rather than the Tories), but seems rather to have been a combination of these things and more, including family tradition; and the Whigs themselves have been seen as a conservative element who simply had the pragmatism to enact such reform as would allow them to preserve their dominant position in society.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Grey,_2nd_Earl_Grey#Lo... [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1750-0206...
The causes are complex, and interesting. One of the big challenges for the British aristocracy was that American farming started to destroy the economics of traditional agriculture-oriented landholding in the UK in the late 19th century.
So, the 'bargain' the British aristocracy had sort of explicitly or implicitly made over the centuries with the rest of the British population was that the aristocracy were, you know, the nobles. The knights. We call them 'armigerous' families because the have a _coat of arms_.
The British aristocracy viewed WWI as an opportunity to be like, "Ok, THIS is our time to shine, this is what we've been playing rugby at Rugby for all these years..." The sons of the British aristocracy signed up eagerly, and were put into leadership positions. In the early part of the war, they were still using tactics oriented around personal bravery and charge-leading, so while WWI was horrific for all of Europe with (IIRC) ~10% of the of-age men being killed in the war, the impact on the aristocracy was much worse, with some estimates being around 30% of the young men of the aristocracy dying in the war.
There were far-reaching restructurings of society after WWI, but the aristocracy couldn't come back from the combined loss of a generation of a men, and failure to achieve their gambit: they basically bet it all on "we'll show you, we'll lead the nation through this war" and the public perception was that they completely failed.
So it's not so much that WWI did it, as it was basically done, and WWI was a last gasp.
Like I said though I read this book in...I wanna say 2006? It's been a while.
There isn't a single bit of effort to demonstrate the connection factually. Just pure, imaginative speculation.
I'm not contesting. Don't have the evidence to support nor deny the allegation.
Onward and upward.
Does anybody have a concise summary of all this stuff that even an American can understand?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerages_in_the_United_Kingd...
What I find confusing about the article is that it's not clear what it means by "her brothers were 50% less likely to enter parliament". Parliament being ambiguous here.
If this refers to entering the House of Lords, then at most one brother (the eldest) could do so upon the death of their father. Is it really saying that the shame of their sisters marrying down dissuaded heirs to peerages from taking up their birthright seats? Seems odd.
Alternatively, is it suggesting that second sons and heir-apparents were standing for elections to the House of Commons (the lower chamber of the legislature, also parliament) and became less successful as their standing dropped?
- That paragraph links to the site of top-tier matchmaker Gray & Farrar [1], which IMO is worth a visit. Beyond parody, and dripping with the smug evils of a British-style class system.
Kinda makes me glad I'm not in THAT dating circle.
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/67891/what-is-the-rea...
Money drives a Ferrari, wealth doesn't drive and all that right?
This smacks of a an entrepreneurial young chancer having a go. The business is founded on the hope that the smug evils of the British class system exist, rather than evidence of them.
Many startups are founded on the idea that there is huge profit to be made by targeting the rich. Sell 'high-end' services at crazy prices. The inflated price is one of the KSPs of the product as the exclusivity itself is what's on sale. The fact that these services exist doesn't really prove anything, other than that there is a perception of something there to exploit. Gray & Farrar looks like a website built by young business guys who have watched too much Made In Chelsea, and The Apprentice. The website is genuine, but yes it's a parody of the British class system, just not a knowing one.
https://www.spears500.com/adviser/4455/claire-sweetingham
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
All-in-all, toe-curling.
But my guess is that they only need 3 or 4 clients a year to run it as a sideline.
I mean, keeping a website and limited company running for a year costs a lot less than the minimum £15k quoted in TFA. They could have had one client since they incorporated in 2009, and be in the black.
https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaires-millionaires-ma...
https://companycheck.co.uk/company/OC346350/GRAY--FARRAR-INT...
£2.8 million in turnover in 2018 though, £2.1 million of that from outside the UK.
There's also a parent company (Hadleigh PVT Limited) that indirectly owns the business. And the parent company paid £192k in rental income to Gray & Farrar in 2018. It is all quite weird, e.g. in 2013: "strategic marketing and business promotion costs have been charged at arms length by a business wholly owned by one of the partners"
2016 accounts say the principal activity was matchingmaking services.
There was certainly a lot of money available if you could hold the job.
(It's a humorous episode in the story. The matchmakers are overjoyed to be commissioned to find a husband for a girl widely known to be young, beautiful, intelligent, and rich. They bring back offers from a string of A-list merchant scions, which leads to frustration because the father specifically wants to marry his daughter to someone very stupid.)
"I have noticed that your son, Phillip von Twattenheim the Fourth, is graying at the temples. Have you betrothed him yet?"
"I have not, but he has recently been accepted by the finest matchmakers in all of Britain, Gray and Farrar."
It doesn't actually have to solve the problem. It just has to make it look like the problem is being solved.
Reminds me of one of the ads that follows me around the internet, for something called SEI Club. It claims to be a matchmaking service for the creme de la creme, but seems to wear the entrepreneurial chancing even more on its sleeve. None of the we've been around for over 40 years / second generation family business stuff. Just pure aspiration: glamorous pictures of pretty, rich-looking people of the type they hope will use the service.
By the way, SEI, I've been happily married for over a decade, and middle-class at best. But thanks for financing my baby white noise app.
Because of dogma, chiefly. People of the time figured she wasn't 'real' in the sense she didn't follow some imaginary ideas of being deserving or whatever. But only after they initially believed her, which means she was socially as adept at the role as any of them.
In most jurisdictions Fraud requires two things: Dishonesty and intention thereby to gain or that another loses. For most people it's thus really easy to avoid committing fraud - be honest. If you don't like honesty you need to ensure you never have intention for you to gain or another to lose, which is going to be a really steep climb in many circumstances given we live under capitalism.
I applaud her for capitalizing on the public gullibility to believe in devine humans with special rights.
It was actuay quite common in the colonial period for quasi pirate types to overstate their experience, earn the remit of a monarch and secure loans for mercenaries in a bid to take some land from a competing European power and possibly enter the low nobility. There were numerous fraudsters among these. Several are well known for their eventual demise but I imagine more than a few managed to succeed and used their wealth and position to patch over the crumbly parts in their past.
In many European countries there's still the concept of nobility[1] with titles, lineage, inheritance and all. It isn't some abstract thing that people choose to believe in or not.
The comment is about a young woman living in NYC who faked being one of these nobles, and used it to defraud people. She went to jail for it[2]. I have no idea what your comment is about or how it ties to any of this.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CILANE
2 - https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17503259/where-is-anna-delvey-...
You don't have to fake having an imaginary special humanness, well any more than the rest are faking anyway.
To your original point -- she went to jail for committing fraud, as in theft via lying. She did not go to jail for being judged "unworthy" by some dogmatic social circle.
She went to jail because she failed to pay for the goods and services she used. They extended her credit because of the false pretenses, but she went to jail for grand larceny.
Yes, an actual noble would go to jail for a similar crime.
But how many famous people have avoided jail for similar issues? If you're famous enough it doesn't even go to trial.
That's my point. She didn't pass some popularity contest because {reasons} and got prosecuted. Which may likely not have happened to a duchess or whatnot.
Because she didn't actually have any money and was ripping everybody off.
even The Onion couldn’t do parody that well
> THIS IS THEREFORE A HIGHLY SELECT AND SOPHISTICATED GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO UNDERSTAND COMPLETELY THE UNSPOKEN RULE OF ONLY WANTING TO MEET OTHER PEOPLE LIKE THEM AND WHO ARE COMFORTABLE WITH WHO THEY ARE AND WHO THEY WOULD IDEALLY LIKE TO MEET.
Now days a person low in the monarchy has better results by defecting while leveraaging their position to some gov or corporate instance. They no longer must endure a less than status with empty hope of falling up luck.
Yet to be seen, but spending has already commenced. Thankfully I think I’ve drilled into my wife’s head the seriousness of psychologically acclimating to having a large sum of money dumped in her lap and to not spend any of it.
There's a Guardian review from 2019 [1] that covers the gist of the subject.
Here's a sample paragraph:
When once asked how young entrepreneurs might succeed in Britain, the late Duke of Westminster, Gerald Grosvenor (owner of 131,000 acres, including much of London’s Belgravia and central Liverpool), observed, drily, that they should “make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror”. Though Shrubsole estimates that the recent sell-off of ancestral lands to the “new money” of hedge-funders and oligarchs accounts for perhaps 17% of the total in England, 30% rests in the hands of the feudal Norman “cousinhood”, whose offspring have until recently preserved their birthright with a Downton-esque doggedness.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/28/who-owns-engla...
The Cultural Revolution couldn’t equalize outcomes in China. The same families are on top in Florence today as in the 1400s, more or less. Gregory Clark’s research oeuvre is all about the persistence of social class. The UK is not unusual.
> Persistence Despite Revolutions
> Can efforts to eradicate inequality in wealth and education eliminate intergenerational persis- tence of socioeconomic status? The Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution aimed to do exactly that. Using newly digitized archival records and contemporary census and household survey data, we show that the revolutions were effective in homogenizing the pop- ulation economically in the short run. However, the pattern of inequality that characterized the pre-revolution generation re-emerges almost half a century after the revolutions. Individu- als whose grandparents belonged to the pre-revolution elite earn 12 percent more income and have completed more than 11 percent additional years of schooling than those from the rest of the population. We find evidence that human capital (such as knowledge, skills, and values) has been transmitted within the elite families. Moreover, the pre-revolution elite either move to opportunities or stay to benefit from the social capital embodied in kinship networks that have survived the revolutions. These channels allow the pre-revolution elite to rebound af- ter the revolutions, and their socioeconomic status persists despite one of the most aggressive attempts to eliminate differences in the population.
http://davidyyang.com/pdfs/revolutions_draft.pdf
> Intergenerational mobility in the very long run: Florence 1427-2011
> The paper examines intergenerational mobility in the very long run, across generations that are six centuries apart. We exploit a unique dataset containing detailed information at the individual level for all people living in Florence in 1427. These individuals have been associated, using the surnames, to their pseudo-descendants living in Florence in 2011. We find that earnings elasticity is about 0.04, much higher than that predicted by traditional models of intergenerational mobility. We also find evidence of strong real wealth inheritance. These findings are confirmed when we test the robustness of the pseudo-links and address the potential selectivity
https://www.eui.eu/Documents/DepartmentsCentres/Economics/Se...
- peers didn’t pay taxes
- inheritance tax (aka death duties) didn’t exist
- owning a lot of land was a great source of income
So while intermarrying helped stop the distribution, the industrial revolution (making various businesses return better than land) and very high inheritance (and other) taxes also lead to redistribution.
0.66 * super rich is still super rich. I wouldn't go so far as to say "the rich stopped intermarrying", although the article explains how a very tiny oligarchy/aristocracy did stop intermarriage at some point.
It's also worth noting that the bourgeois balls the article mentions to reproduce class through marriage are still very much a thing, at least here in France the "rallies" as they're called are still taking place with the same function of producing quasi-arranged marriages to benefit one's family.
A percentile drop of that amount is likely 2-3 orders of magnitude smaller.
Probably not poor by any means... I don't see most of those girls being happy pairing up with anyone below upper middle class..
Equivalent of 50mm usd to 1mm
My favorite line.
Offtopic, kind of sad that "publication" now means the opposite of publication, i.e. concealing something from the public behind a paywall.
We don't have to use guillotines if we can, with much less violence (ideally, none at all), destroy the upper class's ability to function as a class. It's not that I care either way for their lives on an individual level; but, as a student of history, I recognize the horrible downstream costs of even justified applications of violence. This is doubly true in the US, where it's the biggest assholes (the far right, many of whom openly fantasize about a bloody civil war) who are most prepared to go that way.
It will not take a whole lot to destroy the elite's ability to function as an elite, and once that is done, they are nothing but a deservingly disliked tiny minority that have lost the support on which they rely (both individually and collectively) in order to function. In practice, the efforts will probably not be entirely nonviolent (they will certainly be unlawful, and one must be prepared to return fire when fired upon) but the bloodshed can be kept to an absolute minimum so long as focus is kept where it belongs.
so there will always be universities, private clubs, and consolidation of media organizations that function solely due to their network of prior members and influence.
so even if the .01% are more effectively demonized, a surrogate of why they have ability to function as a class will persist.
unless you have a proposal for that too, it pretty much has nothing to do with "bloodshed or not"
How utterly cringeworthy.
It's better to inconvenience (permanently, if they refuse to accept societal progress) a few thousand people up top now, and get it over with, then lose the entirety of human civilization.
But your reply to FredPret presents a false dichotomy - that the only options are do it with little bloodshed, or do it with much. I was (trying to) point out the false dichotomy - FredPret doesn't have to want either of those choices, and in fact, most of us want neither of them.
And presenting people with a false dichotomy, as if those are the only options, is a bit of crummy rhetorical trick. We try to be better than that here.
And to you, specifically, I would say: Beware the fourth option. (First is change with little bloodshed, second is change with a lot of bloodshed, third is no attempt at change.) The fourth option is lots of bloodshed, but no real change (as in the French Revolution, where they swapped a king for the Directory, and then for the Emperor). Just going the bloodshed route doesn't guarantee that you win; if you do win, it doesn't guarantee that the change is progress. Don't be eager to open that door.
Now, in fairness, in your initial post you advocated nonviolent means of making it impossible for the elite to function as the elite. If you are going to try to get rid of them, I applaud your choice of starting point. But you seem far to willing to move to violence if non-violence doesn't get you where you want, and that concerns me.