Conversation

Iโ€™d 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. Isnโ€™t 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 ๐Ÿ˜† โ€œAccording to a 2010 report for Country Life, a third of Britainโ€™s 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. โ€œSome 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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Iโ€™m not the economics historian you want but property ownershipโ€”chiefly, real estateโ€”used to be the major way the wealthy stayed that way. The industrial revolution created a new cluster of opportunity but many of the aristocracy didnโ€™t turn the corner