W. D. Rubinstein
(Second edition, revised and updated)
London: Social Affairs Unit, 2006, pp., £20
Did you know that, on his death in 2001, former Beatle, George Harrison, left the second largest fortune in the UK (£98,916,000)? If you like facts like this, you will enjoy this book, and you will be in good company. As Rubinstein notes, when The Spectator in 1872 published a list of the largest fortunes left during the previous decade, its editors declared ‘the list obtained more readers than the best essay on politics we ever published’(p.18). But, as he also admits, Britain lacks any tradition of ‘muckraking’ journalism decrying the rich, or, it must be said, of radical critical scholarship to investigate their power. Nobody could accuse Rubinstein of either muckraking or radicalism. His awareness of ‘class’ is confined to an interest in whether fortunes are inherited or acquired in one generation, and his interest in ‘politics’ concerns only which parties the rich support. His approach is unquestioningly conservative.
This edition is an update of the author’s now classic book from 1981 on the history of the super-rich in Britain. It coincided with the rise of so-called ‘Thatcherism’, and with an academic debate around the apparent paradox of industrial decline and the rise of an ‘enterprise culture’. He has added some new information and an extra chapter, but otherwise tells the same story. Rubinstein is an indefatigable researcher, who has done his time in the Public Records office; but, without wishing to be unkind, there is a flavour here of what C. Wright Mills once called ‘abstracted empiricism’: a penchant for accuracy at the expense of meaning. This is not entirely fair, of course, because he does try to engage with the historical significance of his findings. His central thesis is that the wealth accumulated by industrial firms was far exceeded, even in the 19th century, by that acquired through landownership, commerce and finance.
He subscribes to the fairly daft idea of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ to which his first edition did much to contribute. This is one of those sub-concepts for which sociologists and social historians in this country have always had a predilection; it is really little more than an ‘image’. The ethical category of the ‘gentleman’ is an obsolete relic of a specific epoch in British history – it has left, to be sure, a distorted after-effect (the word ‘gentlemen’ still appears on toilets) – but as an adjective for any sort of ‘capitalism’ it is an oxymoron (just like the obverse notion of an ‘aristocracy of labour’, which at least was deliberately ironic). The cult of the ‘gentleman’ in the 19th century was part of a cultural strategy for assimilating manufacturers (presumably with provincial accents) into metropolitan manners. God only knows what ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ is supposed to mean, except to suggest that capitalists never get their hands dirty?
This idea also implicitly assumes that wealth accrued by bankers is somehow ‘produced’ by them, and that an entire society can dispense with material production and live from ‘invisible earnbings’. But the period during which commerce and finance superseded manufacturing, as the main source of wealth in Britain, is precisely the period of imperialism and after, when so-called ‘British’ wealth was indeed sucked in from the rest of the world. There is no mention of ‘empire’ or ‘imperialism’ in this book, yet the vast fortunes ‘made’ in these islands, since at least the Second World War, have largely originated outside them. The capitalist fantasy of a world where nobody needs to produce anything (Good-bye, manufacturing base) may have captivated everyone in this country, but it is insanity.
For all his delving into probate records and tax reports, he does not seem to have considered the significance of trusts and foundations – that legal device by which large fortunes can be preserved and passed on, and used for both philanthropic and political purposes. He does not even mention Cecil Rhodes, whose vast wealth endowed the Rhodes Trust – which, along with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment, has been among the most important political institutions of the 20th century. He does not seem interested in the uses to which ‘wealth’ is put. He has some snippets about Rhodes’ fellow mining magnates Wernher & Beit, but nothing about their role in financing the foundation of the London School of Economics.
Nor does he have anything to say about corporate property; his focus is exclusively upon ‘personal’ wealth, in the everyday sense that informs the ever-popular ‘Rich Lists’ that have been a staple of the media ever since The Spectator discovered their sales value.
To be pedantic, there are a couple of minor slips that should have been corrected at the proof-reading stage. He calls Ferdinand Lundberg ‘Felix’ (twice), and seems to believe that Henry Cavendish ‘discovered phlogiston’ (p. 246). In fact, it was Lavoisier who demolished this spurious concept, as any historian would know (outside the UK at least, where ‘history’ does not exclude science, technology, or economics).
One must not, however, be too critical of this book, for all its myopic concentration on individuals and families, because it is always important to have this data, and the author should be commended for his labour in gathering it. My only complaint is that the information is presented simply in lists, fleshed out with anecdotes – like the disaggregation of an organism into its various organs, or a disassembled machine with no attempt to explain how the social process of the production and distribution of ‘wealth’ actually takes place.(1)
Notes
- Lobster readers may be interested to know that a spin-off from Rubinstein’s inquiries into family histories (not mentioned in the present book) was his remarkable discovery that the senior Tory politician Leo Amery kept secret all his life his Jewish ancestry. Since Amery, as Milner’s lieutenant, was the true author of the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 and, as Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, oversaw the creation of the Israeli Defence Force, this fact casts fresh light upon the story of British imperialism during the first two decades of the 20th century. (See this issue of Lobster, p. 9 ).