TIL insiders call the British monarchy the Firm
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It just struck me how utterly bizarre the British nobility is. Like an abacus running within the hypervisor of a modern computer or something. Sweet deal. Whole new meaning to โgrandfathered inโ.
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Iโd be interested in an essay length financial/economic history of the nobility and how it got transformed and economically integrated into modernity, and how much the current kit has managed to establish stable control over. Isnโt like half of London owned by some duke?
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All I know is from fiction mentioning in passing how heavy taxes and death duties slowly led to estates being sold piecemeal to industrialists or turned into tourist attractions. So sounds like up to a point democracy managed to mostly tax the nobility into oblivion.
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Lol decolonization never happened in Britain apparently ๐
โAccording to a 2010 report for Country Life, a third of Britainโs land still belongs to the aristocracy... lists of major aristocratic landowners in 1872 and in 2001 remain remarkably similar.โ
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Damn. โSome of the oldest families have survived in the rudest financial health. In one analysis, the aristocratic descendants of the Plantagenet kings were worth ยฃ4bn in 2001, owning 700,000 acres, and 42 of them were members of the Lords up to 1999โ
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This has to count as the greatest heist in history. Plantegenetโs r2 instead of Oceanโs 11.
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Iโm not the economics historian you want but property ownershipโchiefly, real estateโused to be the major way the wealthy stayed that way. The industrial revolution created a new cluster of opportunity but many of the aristocracy didnโt turn the corner
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the history of landholdings in Britain is fascinating. Many of the upper classes are descendants of those listed in the Domesday Book (the Norman Conquest was pretty thorough) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesday_



