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Ownership Societies: European Trajectories
In the previous chapter we looked at the inegalitarian evolution of the ownership society that flourished in France in the century from the French Revolution of 1789 to the eve of World War I. Though illuminating and interesting, and to some extent influential on neighboring countries, the French case is nevertheless rather special in European and world history. If we stand back a bit and look at the variety of national trajectories on the European continent, we find considerable diversity in the processes by which trifunctional societies were transformed into ownership societies. We turn next to the study of these different trajectories.
I will begin by presenting some general features of the European comparison before taking a more detailed look at two particularly significant cases: the United Kingdom and Sweden. The British case is distinguished by a very gradual transition from ternary to proprietarian logic, which in some respects might seem to be the exact opposite of the French case. We will see, however, that ruptures also played an essential role in Britain, again illustrating the importance of crises and switch points in the social transformation process as well as the deep imbrication of property regimes and political regimes in the history of inequality. The Swedish case offers an astonishing example of early constitutionalization of a society with four orders, followed by an extreme proprietarian transition, with voting rights proportional to wealth. It illustrates to perfection the importance of mass mobilization and sociopolitical processes in the transformation of inequality regimes: once the most restrictive of ownership societies, Sweden became easily the most egalitarian of social democracies. Comparison of the French, British, and Swedish cases is all the more interesting because these three countries played key roles in the global history of inequality, first in the ternary and proprietarian eras and then in the age of colonialism and social democracy.
The Size of the Clergy and Nobility: European Diversity
One way to analyze the variety of European trajectories is to compare the size and resources of the clerical and noble classes in different countries. This approach has its limits, however, especially since the available sources are not ideal for comparison. We can, however, identify common patterns and major differences.
Begin with the size of the clergy. To a first approximation, we find fairly similar evolutions over the long run. Take, for instance, the cases of Spain, France, and the United Kingdom (Fig. 5.1). In all three countries we see that the size of the clergy as a percentage of the adult male population reached very high levels in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on the order of 3–3.5 percent or one of every thirty adult males (and rose even higher, close to 5 percent, in Spain in 1700—that is, one adult male in twenty). The clergy’s share then decreased steadily in all three countries, falling to around 0.5 percent (barely one of every 200 adult males) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These estimates are far from perfect, but the orders of magnitude are quite clear. Today the clerical class represents less than 0.1 percent of the population (less than one person in a thousand) in all three countries, all religions combined. We will also discover that religious practice has declined and that the portion of the population describing itself as “without religion” has increased significantly (to between a third and a half), in most European countries today.1
Although the long-term evolutions are fairly similar, notable in particular for the virtual disappearance of the religious class and collapse of religious practice, the precise chronologies differ markedly from country to country. We can therefore tell several different stories, each of which reflects the evolution of power relations in a specific society, as well as the political and ideological confrontations that took place between state and religious institutions and monarchical and ecclesiastical powers. In France, as noted in the previous chapter, the size of the clerical class was already decreasing rapidly in the final third of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, before being hit hard by revolutionary expropriations and continuing to decline in the nineteenth century.
In the United Kingdom the process began much earlier. There was a sharp drop in the percentage of clerics in the population as early as the sixteenth century, a consequence of Henry VIII’s decision to dissolve the monasteries in the 1530s. There were political and theological reasons for this decision, having to do with the conflict between the British monarchy and the Pope, which eventually gave rise to Anglicanism. The Pope’s refusal to sanction Henry VIII’s divorce and remarriage was only one of many bones of contention between the two powers, but it was nonetheless significant. The question was to what extent the monarchy and nobility were obliged, within the trifunctional order that held sway in European Christian societies, to submit to norms promulgated by the Pope and the clergy—norms that were at once moral, familial, spiritual, and political. There were also financial reasons for the break at a time of budgetary difficulty for the Crown: the dissolution and expropriation of the monasteries, followed by the gradual auctioning off of the monastic estates, brought significant and lasting new resources to the royal exchequer while undermining the financial and political independence of the clerical class.2
FIG. 5.1. The weight of the clergy in Europe, 1530–1930
Interpretation: The clergy represented 4.5 percent of the adult male population in Spain in 1700, less than 3.5 percent of the population in 1770, and less than 2 percent in 1840. We find a general falling trend, but the periodization varies with country: it falls later in Spain, earlier in the United Kingdom, and in the intermediate years in France. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.
In any case, the dissolution of the monasteries, which came at a time when English monks alone accounted for about 2 percent of the male population, dealt an early and crippling blow to the ecclesiastical class in Britain in terms of both personnel and property, while strengthening the Crown and nobility, which bought up many monastic estates and thereby strengthened its hold on Britain’s landed capital. According to available estimates, the size of the clergy had fallen to less than 1 percent of the adult male population by the end of the seventeenth century, at which point it still remained above 3 percent in France (Fig. 5.1). This early ecclesiastical decline in Britain went hand in hand with the development of a novel and extreme form of proprietarianism.
By contrast, the clerical decline came much later in Spain than in Britain or France. The Church, on which the monarchy and nobility had relied during the centuries of the Reconquista, even saw its numbers grow between 1590 and 1700. The Spanish clergy still represented 3 percent of the adult male population at the time of the French Revolution, and it was not until the nineteenth century that it began to shed both property and population share. Throughout the nineteenth century, desamortizacion laws gradually stripped the church of some of its possessions, both financial assets and land, through forced sales of ecclesiastical property for the benefit of the state, which was attempting to modernize itself and to strengthen civil and state institutions. The process continued in the early twentieth century, not without provoking violent opposition and creating strong social and political tensions. In 1911 and again in 1932, tax exemptions that encouraged private donations to religious institutions were challenged.3 In 1931 the Second Spanish Republic met with great difficulty when it tried to seize the assets of the Jesuit order (which had just been dissolved in Spain). To escape earlier expropriations, many of those assets had been registered in the name of supporters of the church rather than religious institutions themselves.
Recall, too, that an ambitious agrarian reform launched in 1932–1933 played a crucial role in the series of events that led to the Spanish Civil War. The reform had nevertheless been conceived in a conciliatory spirit and with only moderate redistributive intent. Landowners were authorized to hold hundreds of acres per commune, with thresholds dependent on crop type. Substantial indemnities were provided, with a schedule that depended on both the size of the parcel and the income of the owner, except for the high nobility, the so-called Grandes de España, whose holdings above a certain threshold were to be expropriated without compensation in view of the special privileges they had enjoyed in the past. Agrarian reform became a rallying point for opponents of the republican government, however, partly because of the threat it posed to what remained of the vast ecclesiastical and especially noble property that had not yet been redistributed and partly because of the fear it aroused among smaller landowners, who recalled the unauthorized occupation of land in 1932–1933 and worried about a potential reprise following the return to power of parties of the left in February 1936.4 The measures adopted by the republicans in favor of secular schools and against religious ones also played an important role in mobilizing the Catholic camp. The coup d’état of August 1936, the Civil War, and the forty years of Franco dictatorship that followed attest to the violence of the transformation of trifunctional societies into ownership and later social-democratic societies; durable traces of these conflictual processes remain everywhere.
Warrior Nobilities, Owner Nobilities
Turning now to the size of the nobility in the various countries of Europe, we again find great diversity, even greater than in the case of the clergy. As we saw previously in the case of France, these spatial and temporal comparisons need to be done carefully because the nobility was usually defined at the local level and its nature varied widely in space and time. The sources are not good enough to allow detailed comparisons of the chronologies and trajectories of different countries.
However, the available sources are adequate to distinguish two extreme patterns: in some countries the nobility represented a fairly small portion of the population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (generally between 1 and 2 percent, and sometimes less than 1 percent); in others, it was significantly larger (typically 5 to 8 percent of the population). There were no doubt many intermediate cases, but with the sources we currently have it is hard to be precise.
The first group of countries, in which the nobility was small, includes France, the United Kingdom, and Sweden (Fig. 5.2). In the case of the United Kingdom, the figures we have given (1.4 percent of the population in 1690 and 1.1 percent in 1800) correspond to a fairly broad definition of nobility, which includes the gentry. Had we included only the small fraction of the nobility that enjoyed political privileges, its share of the population would be much smaller (less than 0.1 percent). In the case of Sweden, the figures indicated (0.5 percent of the population in 1750 and 0.3 percent in 1850) are taken from official censuses commissioned by the royal authorities to measure the size of the various orders and organize representative bodies. They therefore reflect reality as seen from the standpoint of the central government. I will come back to these two cases. For now, note simply that the first group includes countries where the process of centralized state formation was already extremely advanced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
FIG. 5.2. The weight of the nobility in Europe, 1660–1880
Interpretation: The nobility represented less than 2 percent of the population in France, the United Kingdom, and Sweden in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries (with a downward trend) and between 5 and 8 percent in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, and Croatia during the same time. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.
The second group, which consists of countries with large noble classes (representing 5 to 8 percent of the population), includes Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, and Croatia (Fig. 5.2). For the last two countries, the figures are fairly accurate thanks to censuses of the orders conducted in the late eighteenth century by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The estimates for the other countries are less precise. Nevertheless, the orders of magnitude can be taken as significant. In particular, the gap between these countries and those in the first group is quite clear.
How should we interpret the fact that the noble class in some countries was five to ten times as large as in others? Clearly, such differences tell us that the human, economic, and political status of the nobility varied widely. When the noble class is very large, it follows that a significant number of nobles do not own large estates; in practice, many possessed little beyond their title, a certain prestige stemming from previous military service (recognition for which varied with period and country) and perhaps some status advantages. By contrast, a reduced aristocratic class, such as existed in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and France, meant that the nobility had succeeded in constituting itself as a small ownership elite, which held significant amounts of wealth and enjoyed considerable political and economic power.
To explain these important differences between countries, we need to look at the territorial, political, ideological, military, and fiscal history of each European state and at the compromises struck among contending social groups in different periods. For instance, in Spain and Portugal, during the centuries of the Reconquista, the procedures of ennoblement were closely related to the shifting border between Christian- and Muslim-held territory. In practice, the incorporation of new territory into the Christian kingdom often led to the ennoblement of entire villages, decreed by the king or in some cases by the villagers themselves, in exchange for their loyalty and future fiscal privileges. This quickly swelled the ranks of the Spanish nobility, in which huge inequalities separated the elite grandes, who commanded vast estates, from the mass of hidalgos, most of whom were rather poor. In the centuries that followed, the Spanish monarchy met with great difficulty when it came to collecting taxes from the latter; usually it was obliged instead to pay them meager pensions, the cost of which weighed on the royal treasury and impeded modernization of the state.
We find comparable processes and similar inequalities in the Polish, Hungarian, and Croatian nobilities. For instance, the Polish-Lithuanian monarchy expanded its territory and reincorporated lost fiefs in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.5 In Portugal, as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries while the Reconquista was still under way, so-called Livros de Linhagens proliferated; these were books in which the lesser nobility enumerated its many lineages and recounted its military exploits and acts of bravery so that subsequent generations and future monarchs would not forget them.6 Documents of this type are particularly interesting, because they remind us how much the fate of these various nobilities depended not only on the strategies of states and monarchs but also on intellectual and political tools developed by nobles themselves—both lesser and greater—to take stock of their positions and defend their rights and privileges.
It would take many volumes to describe the rise and fall of all these various forms of nobility, and the task is far beyond the scope of this book and in any case exceeds my competence. Instead, I set myself a more modest goal: to add some further details to the British and Swedish cases, which are both well documented and particularly pertinent to the remainder of our inquiry.
The United Kingdom and Ternary-Proprietarian Gradualism
The case of the United Kingdom is obviously of great interest, in part because the British monarchy led the first global colonial and industrial empire from the nineteenth until the middle of the twentieth century and in part because it is in some ways an opposite to the French case. Whereas the French trajectory was marked by the caesura of the French Revolution and by numerous later ruptures and restorations—monarchical, imperial, authoritarian, and republican—over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the British trajectory seems to have been one of strictly gradual change.
It would nevertheless be a mistake to think that it was solely by small touches that the social and political organization of the United Kingdom moved from the trifunctional schema first to a proprietarian logic and then later to the logic of Labour and neo-proprietarianism. The moments of rupture were of crucial importance; they bear emphasizing because they illustrate yet again the multiplicity of possible trajectories and switch points as well as the importance of crises and the sequencing of events in the history of inegalitarian regimes. Two points in particular should be singled out: first, the central role that the battle for progressive taxation played in the fall of the House of Lords, especially in the fateful crisis of 1909–1911; and second, the importance of the Irish question in undermining the dominant order in the period 1880–1920. The Irish question is important because it touched on three aspects of the inequality regime simultaneously: namely, its trifunctional, proprietarian, and quasi-colonial dimensions.
To begin, recall the general context. The British Parliament has ancient roots, dating back to the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The King’s Council, consisting of representatives of the high nobility and clergy, was gradually enlarged to include representatives of towns and counties. The division of Parliament into two houses, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, took place in the fourteenth century. These institutions reflect the trifunctional structure of society at that time. In particular, the House of Lords was composed of members of the two dominant classes, which initially carried equal weight: on one side were the lords spiritual: that is, the bishops, archbishops, abbots, and other representatives of the clerical and religious class; on the other, the lords temporal: dukes, marquesses, earls, and other representatives of the noble and warrior class. In medieval English texts expounding the theory of the three orders, such as that of Archbishop Wolfsan of York, one finds the same concern with equilibrium we noted in comparable French texts. Nobles were enjoined to heed the clergy’s wise counsel of moderation, while clerics were urged in turn not to mistake themselves for warriors and abuse their power, lest the legitimacy of the trifunctional system be undermined.
This equilibrium was seriously upset for the first time in the sixteenth century. In the wake of political conflict with the papacy and Henry VIII’s decision to dissolve the monasteries in the 1530s, the spiritual lords were sanctioned, and their political role diminished. Their presence in the House of Lords was reduced to a small minority, leaving the temporal lords in nearly total control. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the number of spiritual lords was limited to twenty-six bishops, whereas the temporal lords held 460 seats. In the fifteenth century, moreover, the high nobility successfully imposed the principle that nearly all noble seats should be occupied by hereditary peers, that is, dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons, who transmitted their peerages from father to son, generally according to the rule of primogeniture.
As a result, this group enjoyed both permanence and preeminence, shielded from royal power, electoral politics, and rivalry within the nobility (the lower and middling ranks of the nobility played no part in the nomination of peers or perpetuation of peerages). To be sure, the king could in theory always create new lords, in principle without limit, and in case of grave crisis this power allowed him to exert full control over the kingdom’s affairs. In practice, however, this right was always exercised with extreme caution, usually in very specific circumstances and under the control of Parliament, as in the aftermath of the acts of union with Scotland (1707) and Ireland (1800), which led to the nomination of new lords (twenty-eight peers and four bishops in the Irish case, along with a hundred new seats in the House of Commons). The balance of power was not altered.
Many works have shown how extreme the concentration of power and landed property was in the high English aristocracy as compared with other European nobilities. It has been estimated that in 1880, nearly 80 percent of the land in the United Kingdom was still owned by 7,000 noble families (less than 0.1 percent of the population), with more than half belonging to just 250 families (0.01 percent of the population), a tiny group that largely coincided with the hereditary peers who sat in the House of Lords.7 By comparison, on the eve of the Revolution the French nobility owned roughly 25–30 percent of French land; recall, however, that the clergy in France had not yet been expropriated.
Note, too, that the House of Lords played a clearly dominant role in British bicameralism until the last third of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the majority of prime ministers and members of the government issued from the House of Lords, whether they were members of the Conservative (Tory) Party or the Whig Party (officially rebaptized as the Liberal Party in 1859). This tradition would endure until the end of the long mandate of Lord Salisbury, the third marquess of that name, who served as Tory prime minister from 1885 to 1892 and again from 1895 to 1901; subsequent heads of government would issue from the House of Commons.8
Furthermore, the vast majority of the House of Commons itself consisted of members of the nobility in the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries until the 1860s. The Bill of Rights, adopted in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the removal of King James II, confirmed and guaranteed the rights of Parliament, especially regarding taxes and budgets. Yet this foundational text changed nothing in the structure of Parliament or its mode of election. On the contrary, it consolidated a parliamentary regime that was fundamentally aristocratic and oligarchic. Specifically, all laws had to be approved in identical terms by both houses, effectively conferring veto power over all legislation, including fiscal and budgetary matters and anything to do with property rights, on the House of Lords (and thus on a few hundred hereditary peers). Furthermore, the members of the House of Commons were still elected by a minority of property owners. The rules that specified how much tax a person had to pay or how much property he had to own in order to vote were complex and varied from district to district; what is more, they were controlled by local elites. In practice, those rules favored landowners, whose influence was further increased by electoral districting that granted more seats to rural areas.
In the early 1860s, roughly 75 percent of the seats in the House of Commons were still occupied by members of the aristocracy, which accounted for less than 0.5 percent of the British population at the time.9 On the benches of the House of Commons one found representatives of the three principal components of the British nobility: the peerage, other titled nobility, and the gentry (untitled nobility). The peerage was well represented, notably by younger sons of hereditary peers, who normally had no chance of sitting in the House of Lords and therefore chose to embark on political careers in the Commons, generally by standing for election in constituencies where the family held vast amounts of land. In the Commons one also found elder sons of peers awaiting their chance to move up to the House of Lords. For example, Salisbury sat in the House of Commons from 1853 until his father’s death in 1868, at which time he took a seat in the House of Lords before becoming prime minister in 1885.
The Commons also included many members of the titled nobility, especially baronets and knights. This component of the British nobility played no direct political role and enjoyed no special legal or fiscal privileges, but their titles were nevertheless protected by the state, and members were recognized in the protocol of official processions and ceremonies, just behind the hereditary peers. This was a highly prestigious group, only slightly larger than the peerage, to which the monarch could grant access by letters patent following a procedure similar to that used for naming lords. The monarch could in theory nominate as many new nobles as he wished, but in practice moderation was the watchword, as it was with the peers. In the early 1880s there were some 856 baronets in Britain who ranked just below the 460 hereditary peers in the House of Lords, followed by several hundred knights. The title of baronet could also pave the way to a peerage, in case a line of peers was extinguished for want of offspring. Today the Lord Chancellor maintains the Official Roll of the Baronetage.10
Finally, a large number of gentry also sat in the House of Commons. The gentry is the untitled nobility, the largest group in the British aristocracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it had no official existence of any kind, no titles recognized by the state, and no place in processions and ceremonies.
The British Aristocracy, a Proprietarian Nobility
Because the British aristocracy was divided into three groups (peers seated in the House of Lords, other titled nobility, and unofficial gentry), it is very difficult to estimate how its size evolved. The difficulties are somewhat different from those we encountered in the case of France. In the eighteenth century the entire French nobility had a legal existence, since all members enjoyed political privileges (such as the right to choose representatives of the noble order in the Estates General), fiscal privileges (such as exemption from certain taxes, like the taille), and jurisdictional privileges (in seigneurial courts). But nobility was defined at the local level in ways that have left disparate traces that are hard to compare across provinces so that there are important uncertainties about the total size of the group.11 In this same period, the British nobility included on the one hand a tiny titled group (less than 0.1 percent of the population), which included the hereditary peerage, endowed with extensive political privileges (beginning with the right of veto exercised by the House of Lords over all legislation until 1911) and vast landed estates; and, on the other hand, the gentry, by far the more numerous group, since the size of the noble class as a whole is usually estimated to have been about 1 percent of the population in the eighteenth century and 0.5 percent at the end of the nineteenth (Fig. 5.2). But the gentry had no official legal existence.12
The gentry formed a class of prosperous property owners, larger than the tiny titled nobility but still quite small when compared to the bloated ranks of the lesser Spanish, Portuguese, or Polish nobility. Even though it enjoyed no explicit political or fiscal privileges, the gentry clearly benefited greatly from the prevailing political regime, which in many ways reflected a proprietarian rather than a trifunctional logic. The gentry, which included the offspring of younger sons of peers, baronets, and knights as well as descendants of the old Anglo-Saxon feudal warrior class, expanded by welcoming the newly wealthy through strategies of marriage and recognition. The rules that determined the right to vote in elections to the House of Commons were defined at the local level and generally favored landowners; this indirectly advantaged members of the gentry who maintained extensive holdings in land over newly rich town dwellers and merchants whose wealth stemmed exclusively from manufacturing, urban real estate, or finance.
The important point, however, is that the boundaries between different owner groups were relatively porous. No one knew for sure where the gentry ended: one belonged to the group only if other members of the local gentry recognized one’s membership. In practice, many landed aristocratic fortunes were gradually reinvested in mercantile, colonial, or industrial activities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries so that many members of the gentry possessed diversified fortunes. Conversely, many merchants and other bourgeois without the slightest feudal or warrior background had the good taste to acquire substantial estates, adopt a suitable lifestyle, and marry appropriately to secure their entry into the gentry.13 A marriage to an authentic scion of an ancient feudal warrior lineage or even to offspring of titled nobility of more recent vintage made it easier to gain recognition as a member of the gentry but was not indispensable. In many ways the social and political regime that prevailed in the United Kingdom in the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century represented a gradual fusion of aristocratic and proprietarian logics.
The rules governing the right to vote were also defined by local elites. The first real attempt at electoral reform at the national level did not occur until 1832. In that year social agitation in favor of extending the franchise led, against considerable resistance, to Parliament’s passage of the Reform Bill. Some members of the House of Commons saw a chance to improve their standing relative to the Lords. Only about 5 percent of adult males were eligible to vote in 1820: though a small minority, this was still a much larger group than the gentry. The Reform Bill of 1832 greatly increased this number, though those eligible to vote remained a small minority. They represented only 14 percent of the adult male population in 1840 with significant regional variations, as each constituency retained the right to define the exact rules of eligibility, therefore reflecting the strategies of local elites, especially the gentry. Further modification of the rules had to await the truly decisive reforms of 1867 and 1884. It bears emphasizing that the secret ballot was not introduced until 1872. Before that, each individual vote was announced publicly and recorded (researchers can still consult the voting records of elections prior to that date—a precious historical source). Hence it was not easy for voters to make political choices that went against the wishes of their landlords or employers. In practice, many seats went uncontested. The local member of Parliament (MP) was reelected in election after election and often in generation after generation. In 1860 the House of Commons was still profoundly aristocratic and oligarchic.
Ownership Societies in Classic Novels
The porosity of the boundaries between nobles and owners emerges with particular clarity in the literature of the time, most notably the novels of Jane Austen, whose characters illustrate to perfection the diversity of the British gentry as well as the proprietarian logic they shared in the period 1790–1810. All owned landed estates and fine homes, as is only to be expected, and the action moves from gala ball to gala ball and country house to country house. When we look more closely, however, we find that the wealth of Austen’s gentry was quite diversified, including both foreign assets and the gilt-edged bonds that the British government issued in large numbers to finance its colonial and continental military expeditions. Foreign direct investment, especially in slaves and sugar, was also common. In Mansfield Park, Fanny’s uncle, Sir Thomas, has to go to the Antilles for a year with his eldest son to tend to his plantations and business dealings. Austen is silent about the difficulties the two men might have been having with their slave plantations, then at their apogee in British and French colonies. But reading between the lines, one gathers that it was not easy to administer such investments from thousands of miles away. Sir Thomas is nevertheless a baronet and member of Parliament.
Jane Austen’s protagonists are calmer and more rustic than Balzac’s characters, who dream of pasta and perfume factories and bold mortgage schemes and real estate deals in 1820s Paris (although they, too, sometimes dream of earning handsome dividends on investments in slaves in the American South, as Vautrin does in his famous lecture to Rastignac).14 Austen’s characters attest to a world in which various forms of wealth have entered into communion. In practice, what counted was the size of one’s fortune, not the mix or origins of the properties it contained. What determines the possibility that various characters will meet and potentially marry is above all the yield on their capital. The all-important question is whether one’s annual income is 100 pounds sterling (barely three time the average income of the day), or 1,000 pounds (thirty times the average), or 4,000 pounds (more than a hundred times). The first case describes the not very enviable situation in which the three sisters Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret find themselves in Sense and Sensibility; it is almost impossible for them to marry. With 4,000 pounds of income, however, one is closer to the substantial position of their half-brother John Dashwood, who in the very opening pages of the novel seals the sisters’ fate by refusing, in a chilling conversation with his wife Fanny, to share his wealth with the sisters. Between these two extremes lay a whole range of modes of living and socializing, possible encounters, and conceivable fates. Subtle differences divided one subgroup of society from the next, and Austen and Balzac describe these hidden boundaries and spell out their implications with unrivaled power. Both describe ownership societies characterized by very steep hierarchies, in which it seems quite difficult to live with a modicum of dignity and elegance unless one’s income is at least twenty or thirty times the average.15
The nature of the property that yielded this income—whether land or financial assets, factories or colonial plantations, real estate or slaves—ultimately mattered very little, because all these social groups and forms of property were henceforth united by the grace of the universal monetary equivalent and, above all, by the fact that political, economic, and institutional developments (including monetary, legal, and fiscal systems, transport infrastructures, and more generally, the unification of national and international markets through the construction of the centralized state) made it increasingly possible to realize that equivalence in practice. The classic European novels of the early nineteenth century are one of the clearest signs of this golden age of ownership society, especially in its British and French variants.
What is striking is not the intimate knowledge that Austen and Balzac possess of the era’s hierarchy of wealth and lifestyles, nor it is their perfect mastery of the various forms of ownership and relations of power and domination that characterized the societies they lived in. It is their ability not to make heroes of their characters, whom they neither condemn nor glorify. This enables them to convey both their complexity and humanity.
Generally speaking, ownership societies obeyed logics more complex and subtle than did trifunctional societies. In the trifunctional order, the ascription of roles and temperaments was perfectly clear. The grand narrative was one of interclass alliance: the religious, warrior, and laboring classes played distinct but complementary roles, which structured the society, gave it stability, and allowed it to perpetuate itself for the greater good of the entire community. The corresponding literature, from the Song of Roland to Robin Hood, is filled with heroism: noble attitudes, sacrifice, and Christian charity are paramount. The trifunctional schema proposes such clearly defined roles and functions that it has often served as an inspiration for film and science fiction.16 No trace of such heroism remains in ownership society: in the novels of Austen and Balzac, there is no clear relation between the size of one’s fortune and one’s functional abilities or aptitudes. Some people own considerable wealth while others have modest incomes or work as servants. In fact, little is said about the latter, for their lives are too dull. At no time, however, do the novelists suggest that they are in any way less deserving or less useful than their employers. Each person plays the role assigned by his or her capital on a scale that seems eternal and immutable. Everyone has a place in ownership society, in which the universal monetary equivalent allows for communication across vast communities and far-flung investments while guaranteeing social stability. Neither Austen nor Balzac needs to explain to readers that the annual income of capital is about 5 percent of its value or, conversely, that the value of capital is about twenty times its annual yield. Everyone knows that it takes capital on the order of 200,000 pounds to yield an annual income of 10,000 pounds, more or less independent of the nature of the property. For both nineteenth-century novelists and their readers, it was easy to move from one scale to the other, as if the two were perfectly synonymous—two parallel languages spoken by everyone. Capital no longer obeyed a logic of functional utility, as in ternary societies, but only a logic of equivalence among different forms of ownership, thus opening new possibilities of exchange and accumulation.
In the classic novels of the early nineteenth century, inequality of wealth was implicitly justified by its ability to bring remote worlds into contact and by the need for social stability. It is not the role of the novelist, Austen and Balzac seem to say, to imagine a different form of political and economic organization; their task is rather to show us the feelings of individuals and the space that remains for freedom, detachment, and irony, notwithstanding the deterministic laws of capital and the cynical ways of money. By contrast, meritocratic discourse plays no part in the justification of ownership society. Such discourse would come into its own only later, with the rise of industrial and financial capitalism in the Belle Époque and especially in the hypercapitalist era 1990–2020, which celebrates winners and denigrates losers more aggressively than any earlier regime; I will come back to this.
At times, one senses in the nineteenth-century novel the emergence of another possible justification of wealth inequality, namely, the fact that without it, there would be no possibility of a small social group with the means to be concerned with things other than its own subsistence. In other words, in a poor society, inequality may seem to be a condition of civilization. Austen describes in minute detail what life was like in her time: she explains how much it cost to eat, to buy clothing and furniture, and to move about. The reader discovers that if, in addition to these things, one also wants to buy books or musical instruments, one needs at least twenty to thirty times the average income, which is possible only if wealth and the income that derives from it is extremely concentrated. But once again, irony is never far from Austen’s pen, and she, like Balzac, never fails to mock the pretensions of her characters and their supposedly irreducible needs.
Burke’s Peerage: From Baronets to Petro-Billionaires
Another very interesting document (though a good deal less subtle than the novels of Austen and Balzac), from which we can glean a sense of how the logic of aristocracy mingled with that of ownership in the British gentry of the era, is Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage and Landed Gentry of the United Kingdom.
A genealogist by profession, John Burke became famous early in the nineteenth century for his celebrated annual catalogs of the British nobility. His lists of names and lineages soon became the ultimate reference for the study of the British aristocracy of this era. His authoritative listing filled a need because there was no official compilation of members of the gentry, even though it was the largest subgroup of the nobility. The first Burke’s Peerage, published in 1826, met with such resounding success that it was revised and reprinted throughout the century. Every Briton with a claim to gentry status wanted his name to appear in it and delighted in reading Burke’s learned analyses of lineages and fortunes, marriages and estates, glorious remote ancestors and famous contemporary exploits. Some editions concentrated on peers and titled nobility, especially those baronets so illustrious that Burke openly lamented their lack of an official role in service to the realm. In other volumes Burke compiled lists of nobles without official title. The 1883 edition included no fewer than 4,250 families belonging to both the titled nobility and the gentry. Burke’s catalogs were respected throughout the nineteenth century by members of the nobility and their allies but mocked by people irritated by the obsequiously reverential tone that Burke and his successors used to describe these remarkable families that had given so much to the country.17
One finds similar catalogs, royal almanacs, and bottins mondains in many other countries, starting with the Livro de Linhagens compiled in Portugal in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and continuing through the annual compilations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, nobles and their allies could take stock, sing their own praises, and express their demands. Many such catalogs continued to exist long after the nobility had officially disappeared. For instance, if you believe the twenty-eighth edition of the Annuaire de la Noblesse de France, published in 1872, no fewer than 225 deputies (occupying one-third of all seats in the National Assembly) were authentic nobles; they had been elected in 1871 in elections which in hindsight are considered to have been the first of the Third Republic but which took place at a time when no one knew whether the new regime, born of French defeat at the hands of the Prussians, would choose to be a republic or opt for yet another restoration of the monarchy. A writer for the Annuaire expressed joy at “the nation’s cri du coeur, its spontaneous enthusiasm”: “Into what arms could it [the nation] throw itself with greater assurance and sympathy than those of the nobility, whose scions, worthy heirs of the bravery and virtues of their ancestors, so generously shed their blood at Reichschoffen and Sedan? Furthermore, while all the illustrious personages who rallied to the Empire have withdrawn from the battle, it is forty years since we have seen in the elected chamber so brilliant a gathering of illustrious aristocratic names.”18 Nevertheless, the proportion of noble deputies would fall to less than 10 percent in 1914 and less than 5 percent between the wars.19 The Annuaire itself ceased publication in 1938.
As for Burke’s Peerage, it continues to publish to this day. Having counted peers and baronets through the entire nineteenth century, later versions of the catalog include “the great families of Europe, America, Africa, and the Middle East.” In the latest editions, one finds new classes of billionaires who made their money in oil or silicon, a strange mixture of crowned heads and wealthy owners of oil wells and mines and stocks and bonds, all described in the same admiring and reverential tones. The spirit is not far removed from the listings of billionaires published by magazines like Forbes in the United States since 1987 or Challenges in France since 1998. Often owned by illustrious multimillionaires themselves, these publications are generally filled with stereotypical glorifications of wealth well deserved and useful inequality.20
Burke’s Peerage in its original and later incarnations illustrates two key points. First, the British nobility in the nineteenth century was inextricably aristocratic and proprietarian. Second, beyond the British case and the transformation of inequality regimes, there are deep affinities among trifunctional, proprietarian, and neo-proprietarian justifications of inequality. The issue of inequality always arouses ideological conflict. Many discourses clash, some more subtle than others, and the weapons they use take many different forms, from novels to catalogs, from political programs to newspaper columns, from pamphlets to magazines. All of these sources provide useful information about the size of the various contending social groups as well as their respective resources and merits.
The House of Lords, Protector of the Proprietarian Order
We turn now to the fateful fall of the House of Lords and British proprietarianism. The two events are intimately related. Throughout the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries, the House of Lords governed the country and played a central role in the hardening, protection, and increasingly ferocious sacralization of the right of property. Think of the famous Enclosure Acts, enacted and several times reinforced by Parliament, led by the Lords, most notably in 1773 and 1801. Their purpose was to put hedges around fields and put an end to right of poor peasants to use communal land for crops and pasturage.
Also important to mention was the famous Black Act of 1723, which stipulated the death penalty for anyone caught pilfering wood or poaching game on land they did not own. Humble folk had taken to blackening their faces and trying their luck by night, and landlords in the House of Lords and their allies in the House of Commons were determined to prevent this. Anyone who killed a deer, cut down a tree, poached fish from a breeding pond, pulled up plants, or abetted or incited such activity fell under the shadow of the act and could be sentenced to death by hanging without trial of any kind. Initially intended to expire after three years, the law was renewed and reinforced over the next century until these acts of rebellion ceased and the proprietarian order was restored.21
Rather than view the House of Lords as a survival of the trifunctional order amid the ownership society that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is more accurate to see it as the protector of the new proprietarian order and the hyperconcentration of wealth. During the French Revolution, it was in the name of the proprietarian order (rather than the trifunctional order based on equilibrium between nobility and clergy, which would have been particularly out of place since the clergy had long since lost its status in England) that British elites spoke out against what was happening in Paris.
For example, Arthur Young, who was completing his absorbing account of his travels in France when the Revolution broke out, was convinced that the country was on its way to ruin when it was decided in 1789 that nobles and the third estate should sit together in the same assembly. For the traveling agronomist, there could be no doubt that peaceful, harmonious development was possible only in a political system like the English, which afforded a veto to the high nobility, that is, to great landlords—responsible, far-sighted men who worried about the future. For the British elites of that time, the fact that representatives of the third estate were elected under a property-qualified suffrage was not a sufficient guarantee, no doubt because they felt that some day the right to vote would be extended to broader, less responsible classes. The separate vote by orders and the right of veto granted to the high nobility through the House of Lords ensured that no ill-considered policy of redistribution could ever pass into law; because the country could not thus be plunged into chaos and property rights called into question, British prosperity and power remained in safe hands.
The Battle for Progressive Taxation and the Fall of the House of Lords
In fact, it was the extension of the right to elect members of the House of Commons, combined with the issue of progressive taxation, that ultimately led first to the fall of the House of Lords and then of ownership society in general. The movement to extend the suffrage intensified in the middle of the nineteenth century. Universal male suffrage was tried in France from 1848 to 1852 and again after 1871. In the United Kingdom it was not until the electoral reforms of 1867 and 1884 that voting rules were standardized throughout the kingdom, increasing the percentage of voters first to 30 percent and then 60 percent of the adult male population. Universal male suffrage was established in 1918, and the vote was finally extended to women in 1928. This final phase of reform also witnessed the first decisive successes of the Labour Party.22 Before that, however, it was the reforms of 1867 and 1884, coupled with the abolition of public recording of the vote in 1872, that totally transformed the balance of power between the Commons and the House of Lords. After 1884, more than 60 percent of adult males were entitled to choose their own MPs by secret ballot, compared with just 10 percent before 1864 (and at that time of course subject to supervision by local elites). The extension of male suffrage in Britain was certainly slower than in France, which went directly from severely restricted censitary* suffrage to universal male suffrage (Fig. 5.3). Still, political competition in the United Kingdom was totally overhauled in the space of a few decades.23
More specifically, the first effect of these reforms was to induce the old Whig Party, renamed the Liberal Party in 1859, to take up the cause of the new voters and therefore to adopt a platform and ideology much more favorable to the middle and working class. The Reform Act of 1867 did much to ensure the victory of the Liberals in 1880, which paved the way for the Third Reform Act of 1884. This led directly to the loss of dozens of rural constituencies previously held by noble families, which in some cases had held seats without interruption for centuries.24 After 1880 the Liberals backed the Tories, who controlled the House of Lords, into their last redoubts and established their own legitimacy as a governing party. Having distinguished themselves in the fight to abolish the Corn Laws in 1846 and to reduce tariffs and other indirect taxes weighing on workers (while the Tories were suspected, rightly, of wanting to keep grain prices high to protect the profits of their estates), the Liberals began in the 1880s to formulate ever bolder social policies along with progressive taxes on income and estates.25
FIG. 5.3. Evolution of male suffrage in Europe, 1820–1920
Interpretation: The percentage of adult males with the right to vote (allowing for property qualifications) increased from 5 percent in 1820 to 30 percent in 1870 and 100 percent in 1920 in the United Kingdom, and from 1 percent in 1820 to 100 percent in 1880 in France. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.
In the 1880s, Salisbury, the leader of the Tories, imprudently proposed a referendum theory: morally and politically, he argued, the Lords had the right and duty to oppose legislation adopted by the Commons if the majority of the House of Commons had not been elected explicitly on the basis of that specific law, clearly spelled out to the country prior to the election. At first, the Tories thought they had found the answer to the expanded suffrage: in 1894, the Lords vetoed the reforms that William Gladstone, the leader of the Liberals, proposed for Ireland on the grounds that the bill, which was moderately popular in England, had not been explicitly presented to the voters prior to passage. This allowed the Conservatives to win the elections of 1895 and return to power.
But Salisbury had been too confident of the superior ability of the Lords and the Tories to interpret the deep will of the people, and the imprudence of his strategy soon became apparent. Returned to power under Lloyd George, the Liberals won passage of their famous People’s Budget in 1909, at the heart of which was an explosive cocktail: a progressive tax on total income (or “supertax,” levied on top of the quasi-proportional taxes on separate categories of income that had been in force since 1842); an increase in “death duties” on the largest estates; and to top it all off, an increase in the land tax, which hit large landed estates particularly hard. With this package it was possible to finance a series of new social measures, especially worker pensions, at a time when Liberals feared that they would gradually be replaced by the Labour Party (which ultimately did happen); therefore they felt that they had to do something for the working class. The whole package was perfectly calibrated to win the approval of a majority of the House of Commons and above all of the new voters while confronting the Lords with an unacceptable provocation to the delight of Lloyd George, who never missed an opportunity to mock the idleness and uselessness of the aristocratic class. The Lords fell into the trap and vetoed the People’s Budget, despite having voted in 1906–1907 for new labor laws granting additional rights to workers and unions. But by vetoing tax measures that affected them directly, they took the fatal risk of exposing their class bias to the light of day.
Lloyd George then doubled down by having the Commons pass a new law, this time of a constitutional nature, blocking the Lords from amending finance bills (which henceforth became the sole province of the Commons) and limiting their power to block other legislation to a period of no more than one year. Unsurprisingly, the Lords vetoed this suicidal measure, and new elections were held, leading to another victory for the Liberals. By virtue of the Salisbury doctrine, the Lords should then have resigned and agreed to accept the controversial legislation, which was now both fiscal and constitutional. But given the historic issues at stake, many Lords were prepared to reject their leader’s commitment, which in any case was only informal. According to witnesses in a position to know, it seems that the king then threatened to create up to 500 new seats in the House of Lords (in keeping with a secret promise he supposedly made to Lloyd George before the election), and this played a decisive role. It is nevertheless very difficult to say what actually would have happened if the Lords had not finally resigned themselves to passing the new constitutional law in May 1911.26 The fact remains that this was the precise moment when the House of Lords forfeited all real legislative power. Since 1911, it is the will of the majority as expressed at the ballot box and in the House of Commons that has force of law in the United Kingdom, and the House of Lords has been reduced to a purely consultative and largely ceremonial role. The political institution that had governed the United Kingdom for centuries and presided over the emergence of a global colonial and industrial empire had in fact ceased to exist as a decision-making body.
Other less far-reaching constitutional reforms followed: life peerages (as opposed to hereditary peerages) were introduced in 1959, and their number was significantly increased in 1999 so that the majority of members of the House of Lords today are people appointed for their competence or service to the kingdom who cannot pass their seats on to their descendants.27 But it was indeed the crisis of 1910–1911 concerning the issue of progressive taxation and the reduction of social inequality that proved to be the fateful moment when the Lords lost their power. In 1945, a little more than thirty years later, an absolute majority of Labour deputies came to power for the first time. They issued from a political movement whose purpose was to represent the working class, and the new Labour government they established would proceed to establish the National Health Service and implement an array of social and fiscal policies that radically transformed the structure of inequality in Britain, as we will see in what follows.
Ireland Between Trifunctional, Proprietarian, and Colonialist Ideology
Although progressive taxation and the reduction of social inequality were the central issues in the fall of the House of Lords in the period 1909–1911, it is also important to note the role of the Irish question (with its trifunctional, proprietarian, and quasi-colonial dimensions) in the broad challenge to inequality mounted in Britain between 1880 and 1920.
The Irish case was one of extreme inequality stemming from the combined effects of a range of political and ideological causes. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ireland was much poorer than England: its agricultural and manufacturing output per capita was half as large. The gap in the standard of living was aggravated by the fact that most agricultural land in Ireland was held by very wealthy landlords residing in England, most of whom were members of the House of Lords. Although Ireland suffered from the same problem of extremely concentrated land ownership that we saw in England, the issue of absentee landlords, who collected their rents from their English manors, lent a particular coloration to the Irish question. In addition, 80 percent of the Irish population was Catholic, and the civil and political rights of Irish Catholics were severely limited. They were required to pay a tithe to the Church of Ireland (part of the Anglican Communion), to which they did not adhere, and they did not have the right to elect members of the Irish Parliament, which in any case had been subordinate to the Parliament at Westminster since 1494 and could make no decision without its approval. In short, Ireland was in the position of a British colony.
Nevertheless, the British Crown and Parliament, shaken by the American war for independence (1775–1783) and worried about French invasion (1796–1798), passed the Act of Union in 1800; this was not so much a union as a takeover of the Emerald Isle, at best a fool’s bargain. The wealthiest Irish Catholics did obtain the right to vote with a property qualification, and Ireland gained the privilege of electing 100 representatives to the House of Commons. Representation was highly imbalanced, however: although there were, according to the 1801 census, more than five million Irish and barely nine million Britons, the latter were entitled to more than 500 seats, compared to merely 100 for the former. In exchange for Irish representation in the House of Commons in London, the Irish Parliament was abolished, clearly to spare the government in Westminster the need to deal with a Catholic majority in Ireland. In addition, Catholics still had to pay a tithe to the Anglican Church of Ireland, which would become the source of increasingly violent conflict.
The situation grew even more tense after the great Irish famine of 1845–1848, the most severe famine in nineteenth-century Europe: nearly one million died, and 1.5 million more would emigrate in the years that followed out of an initial population of around 8 million.28 Abundant evidence shows that British elites were aware of the disaster and refused to take the necessary steps to prevent it, in some cases with the quasi-explicit Malthusian goal of reducing the number of poor and the number of rebels to boot. The Irish famine is often compared to the great famine in Bengal (1943–1944), in which some four million people died out of a population of fifty million. The comparison is not wholly unjustified, in the sense that while adequate food stores existed in both cases, authorities refused to arrange for immediate transfers to the distressed areas, in part on the grounds that prices should be allowed to rise in order to signal to sellers that the time had come to respond to market demand.29
These events unleashed the rage of the Irish against absentee British landlords, who, not content to collect their rents from afar, allowed the tragedy to unfold on the other side of the Irish Sea. More generally, in the period 1860–1870, a multifarious movement of protest against landlords began to grow, not only in Ireland but also in Scotland and Wales: tenants refused to pay rent and in many cases occupied the land, at times leading to violent clashes with police and landlord militias. Their top demand, especially in Ireland, was to be allowed to work their own land—in other words, to own property.
The Gladstone government then passed the Irish Land Act of 1870, which made it more difficult to evict tenants and provided government loans for tenants who wished to buy their plots, with compensation for those who were driven from their land after making improvements (such as drainage or irrigation)—a common complaint of tenant farmers in all parts of the world. The legal system then in force was extremely favorable to landlords, however, so these measures had virtually no effect. Landlords had only to raise rents just enough to force the departure of any troublemaking tenants. No court or government of the time would have dreamed of interfering with the freedom of contract. To have done more would have risked inflaming relations between landless tenants and landlords not only in Ireland but also in England. It was feared that this might lead to similar demands in other sectors of the agricultural economy and to threats against property rights in general, endangering the owners of real estate and factories as well. If anyone who occupied a property or worked with capital in one form or another could now demand to become its owner on the grounds of having done so for a sufficient length of time, society might simply collapse. In the Irish land debate we hear the same argument that had been raised in the debates over corvées and lods during the French Revolution: namely, that any attempt to question the legitimacy of existing property rights threatened to open Pandora’s box; no one could say where the ensuing crisis would end or whether society would emerge unscathed.
The situation in Ireland became increasingly violent as land occupations and rent strikes spread. Then, with the expansion of the right to vote for MPs in the 1880s, thinking began to change, and fear switched camps, as it were. As long as the Tories were in power in London, they remained pitiless in policing the agitators, adopting for instance the Crime Act of 1891, which gave the police additional powers beyond those already approved in 1881 to arrest “terrorists” and if necessary send them to prison. Meanwhile, everyone concerned—Tories, Liberals, and above all landlords themselves—began to realize that if Irish land was not quickly redistributed to poor Catholic farmers by legal and peaceful means, the situation might rapidly spiral out of control, leading ultimately to Irish independence and complete expropriation of absentee landlords.
This ultimately came to pass with the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and then the Republic of Ireland in 1937 following a series of violent clashes whose traces remain visible to this day. What is interesting for our purposes, however, is that the very real threat of Irish independence compelled the British political system in the period 1880–1920 to accept various agrarian reforms and land redistributions in Ireland, each of which struck a blow at the prevailing proprietarian ideology. Specifically, the government decided to allocate gradually increasing sums to help Irish farmers buy land. In the end, the government itself oversaw the redistribution of Irish lands but with substantial compensation for landlords paid out of the public exchequer. A law to achieve this, far more ambitious and better financed than that of 1870, was passed in 1891. It was followed by another Land Act in 1903, which allowed former tenants to purchase their land with seventy-year loans at a nominal rate of 3 percent (at the time, no one foresaw the inflationary episodes that lay ahead, which in practice reduced the cost of these purchases to virtually nothing); additional aid in the form of government subsidies of 12 percent of the land’s value was also provided. To top it all off, another law was passed in 1923, obliging remaining landlords to sell their land to the new Irish government, which in turn sold it to tenants at low prices. But according to some estimates, nearly three-quarters of the land had already changed hands before the war, thanks in part to the laws of 1870, 1891, and 1903 and, above all, to the mobilization of Irish farmers themselves.30
The Irish experience is revealing in several ways. First, the quasi-colonial situation of Ireland and the enormous inequalities it created led to a more general questioning of the legitimacy of the whole system of private property and the persistent inequality that went with it. For instance, in response to accusations that land ownership had become hyperconcentrated not just in Ireland but throughout the United Kingdom, the Lords agreed to a series of land surveys in the 1870s, which showed that ownership was even more concentrated than even the most pessimistic previous estimates had suggested. These surveys played an important role in the evolution of thinking about inequality and redistribution because they showed that even if Britain was a leader in creating a modern industrial economy, it was a laggard in regard to inequality; what is more, these two realities were by no means contradictory—quite the opposite (rather like Belle Époque France). The Irish case is especially interesting because it points to problems of redistribution and agrarian reform that would arise in other postcolonial contexts, such as South Africa in the 1990s. Furthermore, the Irish experience illustrates the close connection between the question of frontiers and that of redistribution as well as between the political regime and the property regime. The interactions between systems of frontiers and structures of inequality—interactions shaped by questions of politics, wealth, and in some cases immigration—continue to play a key role to this day, not only in Britain and Europe but throughout the world.
Sweden and the Constitutionalization of a Society of Four Orders
We turn now to the case of Sweden, which offers a surprising and relatively little-known example of early constitutionalization of a society of four orders, followed by a novel transition to ownership society in the course of which the Kingdom of Sweden pursued proprietarian logic to a greater extent than either France or the United Kingdom: specifically, Sweden in the late nineteenth century adopted an audacious system of proportional representation based on the amount of property each voter owned (or the amount of tax paid).
The Swedish case is even more interesting because in the twentieth century the country became synonymous with social democracy. The social democrats of the SAP came to power in the early 1920s, when the party’s historical leader, Hjamal Brenting, was elected prime minister. The party subsequently held power more or less permanently from 1932 to 2006, and this long period in government allowed it to develop a very sophisticated welfare and tax system, which in turn achieved one of the lowest levels of inequality ever observed anywhere. People therefore often think of Sweden as a country that has always been inherently egalitarian.31 This is not true: until the early twentieth century Sweden was a profoundly inegalitarian country, in some respects more inegalitarian than countries elsewhere in Europe; or, rather, it was more sophisticated in organizing its inequality and more systematic in expressing its proprietarian ideology and shaping its institutional incarnation. Sweden was able to change its trajectory only thanks to unusually effective popular mobilization, specific political strategies, and distinctive social and fiscal institutions.
People sometimes imagine that each culture or civilization has some “essence” that makes it naturally egalitarian or inegalitarian. Hence Sweden and its social democrats are supposed to have been egalitarians from time immemorial, as if equality were somehow a Viking passion. By contrast, India with its caste system is supposed to have been eternally inegalitarian, no doubt on account of some Aryan mystique. In fact, everything depends on the rules and institutions that each human society establishes, and things can change very quickly depending on the balance of political and ideological power among contending social groups as well as on the logic of events and on unstable historical trajectories, which can be understood only through detailed study. The Swedish case is the perfect antidote to the conservative identitarian arguments that crop up all too often in debates about equality and inequality. Sweden reminds us that equality is always a fragile sociopolitical construct, and nothing can be considered permanent: what was transformed in the past by institutions and the mobilization of political movements and ideologies can be transformed again by similar means, for better or for worse.
Let us begin by reviewing the history. From 1527 to 1865, the Swedish monarchy relied on a parliament, the Riksdag, which consisted of representatives of four orders or estates: the nobility, the clergy, the urban bourgeoisie, and the landowning peasantry. In contrast to trifunctional society, the organization was thus explicitly quaternary rather than ternary. Each of the four orders designated its representatives according to its own specific rules; in practice, only the wealthiest bourgeois and peasants, who paid the most in taxes, had the right to vote. In the Riksdag each order voted separately, as in the Estates General in Ancien Régime France. The rules established by the Riksdagsordning of 1617 specified that the king could cast the decisive vote if the orders were split in half.
Under the Riksdagsordning of 1810, however, the four orders were supposed to continue debating and voting until a three-to-one or four-to-zero majority emerged. In practice, the nobility played a clearly dominant role in this theoretically quaternary system. Its representatives outnumbered those of the other orders, which allowed it to dominate the committees where decisions were debated.32 More importantly, members of the government were chosen by the king, who himself wielded important legislative and budgetary prerogatives, and in practice the principal ministers were generally nobles. The first non-noble head of government did not take office until 1883. Looking at all Swedish governments from 1844 to 1905, we find that 56 percent of ministers were members of the nobility, which accounted for only 0.5 percent of the population.33
Unlike the United Kingdom and France, Sweden began conducting systematic censuses very early on. Relatively sophisticated population surveys began as early as 1750. This led to an administrative definition of the nobility based on certified genealogies tracing ancestry back to the feudal warrior elite or letters of ennoblement issued by the monarch. Neither France nor the United Kingdom had such an official definition of nobility, except for peers of France and the tiny titled nobility in Britain. From census records we see that the Swedish nobility was already relatively small in the mid-eighteenth century; it subsequently grew less rapidly than the total population: the noble class accounted for about 0.5 percent of the population in 1750, 0.4 percent in 1800, and not even 0.3 percent in the censuses of 1850 and 1900. These levels are not very different from those estimated for France and the United Kingdom (Fig. 5.2), except that in Sweden nobility was an official administrative and political category. In Sweden, therefore, we find an unusually close symbiosis between the formation of the centralized state and the redefinition of the trifunctional schema (here in its quaternary variant).
The quaternary Riksdag regime was replaced in 1865–1866 by a censitary parliament with two chambers: an upper house elected by a small minority of large property owners (barely 9,000 electors, less than 1 percent of the adult male population), and a lower house, also censitary but considerably more open in that roughly 20 percent of adult males were entitled to vote for its members.
Compared with other European countries that reformed their voting systems in the same period, Sweden remained quite restrictive: universal male suffrage was definitively restored in France in 1871, and the British reforms of 1867 and 1884 increased the percentage of adult males with the right to vote first to 30 percent and then to 60 percent. The suffrage was not expanded in Sweden until the reforms of 1909–1911, and it was not until 1919 that all property qualifications were eliminated for men; the vote was then extended to women in 1921. In 1900, when only a little more than 20 percent of adult males had the right to vote, Sweden was among the least advanced countries in Europe, particularly when compared with France and the United Kingdom (Fig. 5.3) and also compared with the other countries of northern Europe.34
One Man, One Hundred Votes: Hyper-Censitary Democracy in Sweden (1865–1911)
What was unique about the censitary system in effect in Sweden from 1865 to 1911 was that the number of votes each voter could cast depended on the size of that voter’s tax payments, property, and income. The men sufficiently wealthy to vote in elections for the lower house were divided into forty-odd groups, and each group was assigned a different electoral weight. Specifically, each member of the least wealthy group could cast one vote, while each member of the wealthiest group could cast as many as fifty-four votes. The exact weight assigned to each voter was set by a formula (fyrkar) that took into account tax payments, wealth, and income.35
A similar system applied to municipal elections in Sweden in the period 1862–1909, with the additional wrinkle that corporations also had the right to vote in local elections, again casting a number of ballots that depended on their tax payments, property, and profits. No voter in an urban municipal election, whether a private individual or a corporation, could cast more than one hundred ballots. In rural towns, however, there was no such ceiling; indeed, in the municipal elections of 1871, there were fifty-four rural towns in Sweden where one voter cast more than 50 percent of the votes. Among these perfectly legitimate democratic dictators was the prime minister himself: in the 1880s Count Arvid Posse alone cast the majority of ballots in his home town, where his family owned a vast estate. A single voter cast more than 25 percent of the ballots in 414 Swedish towns.36
We can learn a great deal from this extreme Swedish distortion of the “one man, one vote” principle, which was tempered by the electoral reforms of 1911 and finally ended by the advent of universal suffrage in 1919–1921. First, it shows that inequality is not the product of some essential cultural predisposition: in the space of a few years Sweden moved from the most extreme hyper-inegalitarian proprietarian system, which survived until 1909–1911, to a quintessential egalitarian social-democratic society once the SAP came to power in the 1920s and then ruled almost continuously from 1932 to 2006 (the only such case in Europe). Indeed, the second phase may have been a response to the excesses of the first, at least in part: in Sweden, the working and middle classes, which were exceptionally well educated for the time, were exposed to an extreme form of proprietarianism, and this may have persuaded them that it was time to get rid of this hypocritical ideology and move on to something else, in this instance by adopting a radically different ideology. We will encounter numerous examples of sudden changes of direction in national political ideology; for instance, the rather chaotic shifts in attitudes toward progressive taxation and acceptable inequality in the United States and United Kingdom over the course of the twentieth century.
There is also reason to believe that the construction of the modern centralized state, which came particularly early in Sweden, naturally opened the way to a variety of possible trajectories. In other words, a given highly structured state organization can implement different kinds of political projects. The censuses that the Swedish state conducted of orders and classes and of taxes and wealth in the eighteenth century made it possible to assign different weights to each voter in the nineteenth century. Then, thanks to significant ideological transformations and social-democratic control of the state apparatus, the same state capacity could be put to use by the modern welfare state. In any event, the very rapid transformation that took place in Sweden demonstrates the importance of popular mobilization, political parties, and reformist programs in the transformation of inequality regimes. When conditions are right, these processes can lead to rapid radical transformation by legal parliamentary means, without violent upheaval.
Shareholder Society, Censitary Suffrage: What Limits to the Power of Money?
The Swedish experience also shows that proprietarian ideology is not monolithic. It always needs to fill some kind of political void or uncertainty. In some cases this can give rise to significant social coercion and domination of some groups over others. Proprietarian ideology rests on a simple idea, namely that the primary purpose of the social and political order is to protect private property rights for the sake of both individual emancipation and social stability. But this fundamental premise leaves the question of the political regime largely open. To be sure, it implies that it may be preferable to accord more political power to property owners, who (it is claimed) are more likely to take the long view and not sacrifice the country’s future for the sake of satisfying immediate passions. But this says nothing about how far one ought to go in this direction or by what means.
In the British censitary system as well as in most other European countries and ownership societies, things were relatively simple. Citizens were divided into two groups: those who were sufficiently wealthy to be classified as active citizens and granted the right to vote for MPs and those who did not meet that criterion, who were expected to content themselves with being passive citizens without representation in Parliament. The absence of a secret ballot before 1872 allowed the wealthiest landlords and most powerful citizens to influence the votes of others, but they did so indirectly rather than explicitly—in contrast to Sweden, where the wealthiest voters could cast extra ballots, and some active citizens enjoyed more rights than others.
The censitary system in France in the period 1815–1848 was quite similar to the English system of the same era, and indeed much of the high French nobility had spent time in England between 1789 and 1815. The French parliament had a Chamber of Peers (composed primarily of hereditary peers chosen by the king among the high nobility, like the House of Lords), and a Chamber of Deputies, elected by censitary suffrage more restrictive than that applied to the House of Commons. French jurists introduced one innovation, however: there were two categories of active citizens in France. During the Restoration (1815–1830), the right to vote was granted to men above the age of 30 who paid more than 300 francs in direct taxes (the quatre vieilles), a group of about 100,000 men, or barely 1 percent of the adult male population. But in order to be elected a deputy, one had to be 40 or older and pay more than 1,000 francs in direct taxes, which limited eligibility to about 16,000 men or less than 0.2 percent of the adult male population. In 1820, a so-called “double vote” law was promulgated: this allowed the wealthiest quarter of those with the right to vote (a group corresponding roughly to those eligible to be elected deputies) to vote a second time for some members of the Chamber of Deputies. Following the revolution of 1830, the suffrage was slightly enlarged: under the July Monarchy (1830–1848), the number of voters increased to slightly more than 2 percent of the adult male population, and the number eligible to be elected rose to about 0.4 percent. But the principle of two categories of active citizens was maintained, though no attempt was made to push this logic further.37 Prussia, which dominated the German Reich from 1871 to 1918, relied from 1848 until 1918 on a novel system with three classes of voters defined by the amount of tax they paid, with each group chosen so that its members, taken together, paid one-third of the total tax bill.38
The Swedish approach in the period 1865–1911 can be seen as a generalization of the censitary model: the wealthiest citizens could cast as many as 100 ballots in urban municipalities or, if they were rich enough, nearly all the votes in certain rural towns. Such a system is analogous to the voting system in a meeting of corporate stockholders, where votes are apportioned according to the number of shares each person owns. Interestingly, this analogy was drawn explicitly in some nineteenth-century ownership societies. For example, joint-stock companies in the United Kingdom gradually introduced systems with several classes of shareholders, so that the largest contributors of capital could exercise more votes, without going so far as to make the number of votes strictly proportional to the size of the investment because it was feared that this would concentrate too much power in the hands of a small number of shareholders and thus impair relations among partners and the quality of their deliberation. Typically, all stockholders holding a number of shares above a certain threshold were entitled to the same number of votes, thus establishing a ceiling on the maximum number of ballots any single individual could cast. One finds similar systems in the United States in the early nineteenth century: many companies granted fixed voting rights, sometimes in several tranches, so as to limit the power of the largest shareholders.39 It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that the “one share, one vote” model was accepted as a norm as a result of pressure from large shareholders. In the United Kingdom, the Company Law of 1906 enshrined in law the principle of proportionality between shares held and voting rights as the default mode of governance of British corporations.40 It is interesting to note that these debates on shareholder voting (especially in colonial companies, such as the various India Companies and the Virginia Company) and voting rules for regional assemblies and parliaments were themselves preceded by complex and long-running debates about the rules of voting in ecclesiastical assemblies.41
These historical experiences are quite important for many contemporary debates about how best to limit the power of money and property. Of course, no one today is proposing that the right to vote should depend explicitly on wealth, as in the past. Nevertheless, recent years have witnessed the development of various doctrines and ideologies, most notably in the US Supreme Court, whose purpose is to eliminate ceilings on private contributions to political campaigns; this is tantamount to granting potentially unlimited electoral influence to the wealthiest individuals. The issue of limiting the power of wealth also comes up in relation to jurisdictional inequalities: for instance, certain disputes are now subject to private arbitration, which allows the wealthy to avoid judgment by the public court system. Access to higher education is also influenced by wealth: many American and international universities give special consideration to the children of wealthy donors, yet tellingly, these policies are rarely discussed in public. And so on. Later we will see that there have been important innovations in shareholder voting and corporate governance. Many countries, including Sweden and Germany, have curtailed shareholder rights and increased the power of workers and their representatives (who are entitled to a third to a half of the seats on corporate boards). These innovations are currently under active debate in many countries that initially resisted them (such as France, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and could well lead to further developments.42
More generally, I want once again to insist on the diversity and complexity of the political, ideological, and institutional trajectories that led, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from trifunctional societies to the triumph of ownership societies and then to the social-democratic, communist, and neo-proprietarian societies of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Once the primacy of private property rights, presumably open to all, and the monopoly of the centralized state over regalian powers (justice, police, and legitimate violence) was established, numerous issues remained to be clarified, starting with the organization of state power.
Prior to the nineteenth century, some societies had gone quite a long way toward monetizing relations of power and public functions. In France, for example, the venality of charges and offices had become quite widespread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: growing numbers of public offices and charges had been put up for sale, particularly in the areas of tax collection and justice. This was both a consequence of the financial needs of the absolute monarchy (and its inability to raise sufficient funds through taxation) and a reflection of proprietarian logic and incentives. A person prepared to hand over a significant amount of capital in return for a public office could not be all bad; in any event, he would bear the cost of his own errors and mismanagement and therefore have every incentive to act for the benefit of the community. Traces of this logic persist to this day. Candidates for some public jobs—police in Indonesia, for example, or the French tax officials known as trésoriers payeurs généraux—must put up large sums of money before taking office; in case of malfeasance these “surety bonds” are not returned.43 The French Revolution put an end to most of these venal offices, with compensation to their owners: the sovereignty of the state could no longer be sold piecemeal, but that was no reason to mistreat those who had invested their money in offices before the Revolution.44
These debates show that proprietarian ideology can take more than one form, and some of those forms still have resonance today. No one today would think of selling government posts and offices (although the American practice of rewarding large political donors with important diplomatic posts is clearly a form of venality). Yet as public debt in the rich countries climbs to historic highs, in some cases exceeding the value of all public assets combined, one might argue that the public treasury and the functions of the state are once again subject to control by private creditors. This extends the range of what it is possible to own; the form of ownership is different from that of venal offices, but the effect in extending the reach of private wealth is similar if not greater, given the sophistication of today’s legal and financial system. In the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth, property relations are never simple: they depend on the legal, fiscal, and social system in which they are embedded. That is why it is impossible to study twenty-first-century neo-proprietarianism without first analyzing the various forms of nineteenth-century ownership society.
The Inegalitarian Tendencies of Nineteenth-Century Ownership Societies
What can we say about the evolution of the concentration of ownership in the United Kingdom and Sweden in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How do the trajectories of those two countries compare with that of France? Although British and Swedish estate records are not as rich or comprehensive as those that the Revolution bequeathed to France, they are nevertheless largely sufficient to establish key orders of magnitude.
The most striking finding is that despite all the differences in the trajectories of these three countries, all exhibit a similarly high degree of concentration of ownership throughout the long nineteenth century. The key fact is that inequality increased during the Belle Époque (1880–1914); only after World War I and the violent political shocks of the period 1914–1945 do we see a significant decrease in the concentration of wealth. This conclusion holds for both the United Kingdom (Fig. 5.4) and Sweden (Fig. 5.5), as well as France45 and all other countries for which we possess adequate historical documentation.46
FIG. 5.4. Distribution of property in the United Kingdom, 1780–2015
Interpretation: The share of total private property (real estate, professional, and financial assets, net of debt) belonging to the wealthiest 10 percent was roughly 85–92 percent in the United Kingdom from 1780 to 1910. Deconcentration began after World War I and ended in the 1980s. The principal beneficiary was the “patrimonial middle class” (the middle 40 percent), here defined as the group between the “lower class” (bottom 50 percent) and the “upper class” (wealthiest 10 percent). Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.
Several points call for clarification. First, the fact that the compression of wealth inequality does not really begin until World War I obviously does not mean that it would not have occurred had there been no war. The inegalitarian tendencies of nineteenth-century ownership society, contradicting the emancipatory promises that had followed the downfall of the preceding ternary societies, were abetted by a specific legal and fiscal system. The growth of inequality strongly contributed to the emergence of socialist, communist, social-democratic, and Labourite movements of one kind or another in the second half of the nineteenth century. As we have seen, movements in favor of universal suffrage and progressive taxation began to yield tangible reforms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. True, the full effects of these reforms would not be felt until after 1914; in particular, top marginal tax rates did not reach modern levels before World War I—with rates in the tens of percent on the highest incomes and largest estates—in France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, or other Western countries. Nevertheless, there is good reason to think that the powerful social and political tensions stemming from rising inequality contributed to the rise of nationalism and therefore the likelihood of war. In addition, it is quite easy to imagine other series of events that might have led to other crises—whether military, financial, social, or political—that could have had a similar triggering effect. We will return to this point when we examine the fall of ownership societies in the twentieth century.47
FIG. 5.5. Distribution of property in Sweden, 1780–2015
Interpretation: The share of total private property (real estate and professional and financial assets, net of debt) belonging to the wealthiest 10 percent was roughly 84–88 percent in Sweden from 1780 to 1910. Deconcentration began after World War I and ended in the 1980s. The principal beneficiary was the “patrimonial middle class” (the middle 40 percent), here defined as the group between the “lower class” (poorest 50 percent) and “upper class” (wealthiest 10 percent). Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.
Second, it is important to note that significant differences existed among the three countries: concentration of wealth was exceptionally high in the United Kingdom, slightly lower in Sweden, and still lower in France. Specifically, the wealthiest 10 percent of Britons owned 92 percent of private wealth in the United Kingdom on the eve of World War I, compared with “only” 88 percent in Sweden and 85 percent in France. More significantly, the wealthiest 1 percent owned 70 percent of the wealth in the United Kingdom, compared with roughly 60 percent in Sweden and 55 percent in France (but more than 65 percent in Paris).48 The higher concentration in Britain can be explained by the exceptionally high concentration of wealth in land. But the fact is that at the beginning of the twentieth century, agricultural land no longer accounted for more than a small fraction of total private wealth (barely 5 percent in the United Kingdom and between 10 and 15 percent in Sweden and France).49 The vast majority of wealth took the form of urban real estate, shares in financial and nonfinancial corporations, and foreign investments, and the legal and fiscal system that allowed this type of accumulation was to a first approximation just as favorable to the owners of capital in republican France as in the United Kingdom and Sweden, notwithstanding the contrary opinion of the Third Republic’s elites.
The point here is not to blur the political and institutional differences among these countries, which were real. Nevertheless, in a comparative long-run perspective, the various ownership societies that flourished in Europe during the long nineteenth century shared many striking common features. Averaging over all countries in the period 1880–1914, we find that European ownership society was characterized by extreme inequality, with 85–90 percent of the wealth held by the wealthiest 10 percent, only 1–2 percent of the wealth held by the poorest 50 percent, and roughly 10–15 percent by the middle 40 percent (Fig. 5.6). Turning to the distribution of income, including both income from capital (which was as unequally distributed as wealth, if not slightly more so) and income from work (distinctly less unequally distributed), we find that income in the European ownership society of the Belle Époque was quite unevenly distributed but noticeably less so than wealth, with roughly 50–55 percent of the income going to the top 10 percent of earners, 10–15 percent to the bottom 50 percent, and roughly 35 percent to the middle 40 percent (Fig. 5.7). These figures will serve as useful guideposts, providing orders of magnitude we can compare with the other inequality regimes we will encounter in what follows.
FIG. 5.6. Extreme wealth inequality: European ownership societies in the Belle Époque, 1880–1914
Interpretation: The top 10 percent share of total private property (real estate, land, professional and financial assets, net of debt) was on average 84 percent in France from 1880 to 1914 (compared with 14 percent for the middle 40 percent and 2 percent for the poorest 50 percent); in the United Kingdom the comparable figures were 91, 8, and 1 percent, and in Sweden 88, 11, and 1 percent. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.
FIG. 5.7. Income inequality in European ownership societies in the Belle Époque, 1880–1914
Interpretation: The top 10 percent of earners claimed on average 51 percent of total income from capital and labor in France between 1880 and 1914 (compared with 36 percent for the middle 40 percent and 13 percent for the bottom 50 percent of the distribution; comparable figures for the United Kingdom were 55, 33, and 12, and for Sweden, 53, 34, and 13. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/ideology.
The Three Challenges of Ownership Society
Let me sum up what we have learned about ownership societies and see where we stand in our inquiry. Compared with trifunctional societies, which depended on relatively rigid status disparities among clergy, nobility, and third estate and a promise of functional complementarity, balance of power, and cross-class alliances, ownership society rested on a promise of social stability coupled with individual emancipation through the right of property, supposedly open to all, independent of social and familial origin. In practice, however, in the first phase of its historical development as a dominant ideology (in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), proprietarian ideology encountered three major obstacles.
First, the internal challenge of inequality: the concentration of wealth rose to extreme heights in all European ownership societies in the nineteenth century, equal to or greater than the levels of inequality observed in the societies of orders that preceded them and in any case much higher than could be easily justified as serving the general interest. This happened, moreover, at a time when economic and industrial development required educational equality, not sacralization of property rights, which ultimately threatened to undermine social stability (an essential condition of economic development, which requires a minimum of equality, or at any rate the construction of a norm of inequality reasonable enough to command the approval of a majority). The challenge of inequality led to the emergence first of a counter-discourse and then of social-democratic and communist counter-regimes in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.
Second, the external challenge of colonialism: European prosperity, which stood out with increasing clarity when compared with the situation of other continents in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, depended more on its extractive capacity and military, colonial, and slave-based domination over the rest of the world than on its supposed moral, institutional, and proprietarian superiority. The West’s mission civilisatrice was long justified on moral and institutional grounds, but its fragility became increasingly apparent to many of the colonizers and above all to the colonized, who mobilized to get rid of it. The counter-discourse of social-democratic and communist counter-regimes also fueled the denunciation of the colonial (and, to a lesser degree, patriarchal) dimension of the proprietarian order.
Finally, the nationalist and identitarian challenge: the European nation-states responsible for the protection of property rights and the promotion of economic and industrial development across vast swaths of territory themselves embarked on a phase of exacerbated competition and reinforced national identities and borders in the nineteenth century; this was followed by a self-destructive phase in the period 1914–1945. The first two challenges actually helped give rise to the third, to the extent that social tensions at home and colonial competition abroad contributed substantially to the rise of nationalism and the march toward war that would ultimately sweep away the nineteenth-century proprietarian order.
One of the main objectives of this book is to analyze how these three fragilities combined to produce an extremely intense crisis of ownership society in the twentieth century, as it confronted world war, social-democratic and communist challenges, and colonial independence movements. Today’s world is a direct consequence of this crisis, yet its lessons are all too often forgotten, especially since the revival of neo-proprietarian ideology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries following the communist debacle. Before we take up that question, however, it is time to look beyond Europe and to begin our analysis of colonial and slave societies. More generally, we want to look at how the transformation of trifunctional societies outside Europe was affected by the intervention of proprietarian colonial powers in their developmental processes.
2. G. W. Bernard, “The Dissolution of Monasteries,” Journal of the Historical Association, 2011.
3. See online the Spanish estate data collected by M. Artola, See also the work of C. Milhaud on church property and that of M. Artola, L. Baulusz, and C. Martinez-Toledano on the evolution of property structure in Spain since the nineteenth century.
4. For a classic study of this dramatic sequence of events, see E. Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain. Origins of the Civil War (Yale University Press, 1970).
5. See, for example, M. Lukowski, The European Nobility in the 18th Century (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003), pp. 12–19.
6. See A. Duggan, ed., Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe (Boydell Press, 2000), pp. 223–235.
7. D. Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 9, table 1.1.
8. Alec Douglas-Home, who served as Tory prime minister in 1963–1964, was, like Salisbury, a member of the House of Lords, but he resigned upon being named head of government; times had changed, and it seemed incongruous for the country to be led by a lord. Winston Churchill, Tory prime minister from 1940 to 1945 and 1951 to 1955, was born into an aristocratic family that included several members of the House of Lords, but he himself was elected to the Commons. He even spent a brief period as a Liberal in 1905 before returning to the Tories in 1924, which his adversaries took as proof of his opportunism and lack of loyalty to traditional aristocratic values.
9. D. Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, pp. 11–16.
10. In 2019 some 962 baronets figured on this list, which includes the title created for Dennis Thatcher (husband of Margaret), which was passed on to his son in 2003.
12. Available estimates put the size of the gentry at between 15,000 and 25,000 adult males in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their absolute number seems not to have changed very much (apart from a slight increase in the eighteenth century and slight decrease in the nineteenth century). As a portion of the population, however, the gentry was in rapid decline because the population as a whole was increasing from barely two million heads of family in England and Wales at the end of the eighteenth century to six million in the 1880s. The gentry thus declined from 1.1 percent of the population to 0.3 percent between 1800 and 1880. In any case, it was much larger than the titled nobility (with 1,000–1,500 titles, counting lords, baronets, and knights). The gentry itself consisted of some 3,000 to 5,000 esquires and 15,000 to 20,000 gentlemen. See the online appendix.
13. D. Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. The political promotion of the new bourgeois and mercantile elites, which in the best of cases led to their integration into the gentry, began in the Middle Ages in cities and royal territories where the right to vote was easier to obtain than on noble or ecclesiastical lands. See, for example, C. Angelucci, S. Meraglia, and N. Voigtlaender, How Merchant Towns Shaped Parliaments: From the Norman Conquest of England to the Great Reform Act (NBER Working Paper 23606, 2017).
14. See T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. A. Goldhammer (Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 238–242.
15. The incomes of the various characters are given in terms of the ratio to the average national income per adult at the time. It is interesting to note that the amounts mentioned by Balzac are almost identical to those imagined by Austen, taking the exchange rate into account (between 1800 and 1914 the pound sterling was worth about 25 gold francs). See Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 411–416.
16. In The Planet of the Apes, the gorillas are the warriors, the orangutans are the priests, and the chimpanzees are the third estate (following the well-known ternary structure, soon to be complicated by the integration of humans, former slave drivers who now had become slaves). In Star Wars the Jedi are both wise and great warriors. The “force” that guides them embodies the fusion of the two elites of trifunctional society.
17. Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, pp. 15–16.
18. The Annuaire went on to enumerate among the noble deputies no fewer than nine princes and dukes, thirty-one marquises, forty-nine counts, nineteen viscounts, nineteen barons, and eighty “bearing only a noble particule,” adding: “We cannot fully guarantee the accuracy of this classification, although it is based as much as possible on authentic documents. Some deputies neglect or refuse to assume their titles, while others claim what are not even courtesy titles, to which they have no right.” See Annuaire de la noblesse de France (1872), pp. 419–424.
19. See J. Bécarud, “Noblesse et représentation parlementaire: les députés nobles de 1871 à 1968,” Revue française de science politique, 1973.
20. To some extent these classifications are also a response to legitimate demands for information about the top of the social hierarchy, which government statistics largely ignore. See Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 432–446.
21. See E. P. Thompson’s classic book, Whigs and Hunters. The Origin of the Black Act (Allen Lane, 1975). Similar harsh measures to enforce property rights can be seen elsewhere in Europe; for example, in Prussia in 1821, which made an impression on young Karl Marx. Raoul Peck’s biographical film of Marx (The Young Karl Marx, 2017) opens with a scene of peasants collecting wood being attacked by a landlord’s militia. The French Revolution ordered the opening of private land and forests to hunters, a measure that is still in place today and that is defended by the French Communist Party.
22. N. Johnston, The History of the Parliamentary Franchise (House of Commons Research Paper, 2013). It is interesting to note that prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 (the first national legislation on the right to vote), no formal rule limited this right to men. It was merely a custom, and there may have been cases of female landlords who voted. The right to vote was partially extended to women over the age of 30 in 1918.
23. In addition, these forms went together with ambitious (and, for the time, quite innovative) measures to regulate candidate spending: the Corrupt Practices Prevention Act of 1854, which obliged candidates to declare their expenses, and the Corrupt and Illegal Practice Act of 1883, which drastically limited total expenditures. J. Cagé and E. Dewitte, “It Takes Money to Make MPs: New Evidence from 150 Years of British Campaign Spending” (Sciences Po, 2019).
24. Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, pp. 142–143.
25. The Corn Laws, which limited imports of grain and other agricultural products and protected domestic production, were repealed in 1846 under a Tory government led by Robert Peel, but the vote divided the party, so much so that supporters of Peel (including Gladstone) eventually quit the party and joined the Whigs, ultimately leading to the foundation of the Liberal Party in 1859. This mobilization of the Liberals in favor of workers and against the protectionist landed aristocracy had a lasting impact on attitudes toward free trade and competition in the United Kingdom, in contrast to France, where the landed aristocracy had largely disappeared and the defense of the small independent peasant producer played a fundamental role in structuring the political system, a role that continues to this day. On this, see D. Spector, La gauche, la droite et le marché. Histoire d’une idée controversée (19e-21e siècles) (Odile Jacob, 2017), pp. 43–52.
26. Note that a royal threat to create new seats in the House of Lords to overturn the majority there had already played an important role in the adoption of the Reform Bill of 1832. But there, too, it is very difficult to know if the king would have made good on his threat if a compromise (less ambitious than the original form) had not been struck with the Lords. See D. Cannadine, Victorious Century: The United Kingdom 1800–1906 (Viking, 2017), p. 159.
27. In 2019, the House of Lords comprised 792 members, including twenty-six lords spiritual (Anglican bishops), ninety-two hereditary lords temporal, and 674 lords temporal appointed for life (life peers). A reform to have 80 percent of members chosen by election was debated in 2010–2012 but ultimately abandoned (there was no agreement on how to define electoral rules distinct from those of the Commons but still justifiable). The Parliament Act of 1949 reduced to one year the period during which the Lord could block a nonbudgetary law (a period finally set at two years in 1911). This does not prevent the Lords from reminding the Commons of their existence from time to time, as during the Brexit debate of 2018–2019, though without lasting consequences.
28. Cannadine, Victorious Century, pp. 211–212.
29. See A. Sen. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford University Press, 1981).
30. Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, pp. 104–105. Note, however, that but for future inflation and Irish independence, the cost of paying for redistributed land would have weighed heavily on the budgets of Irish farmers for a long time to come.
31. For an illuminating analysis of the myth of Swedish exceptionalism, as constructed over the course of the twentieth century, see E. Bengtsonn, “The Swedish Sonderweg in Question: Democratization and Inequality in Comparative Perspective, c. 1750–1920,” Past and Present, 2018.
32. In 1809, for example, the Riksdag included 700 representatives of the nobility, forty-two of the clergy, seventy-two of the bourgeoisie, and 144 of the peasantry.
33. Bengtsonn, “The Swedish Sonderweg in Question,” p. 20.
34. The data depicted in Fig. 5.3 only take into account restrictions linked to property qualifications. The conclusion is the same if one takes into account the fact that not everyone who had the right to vote was actually registered and if one compares Sweden to other Nordic countries. See the online appendix.
35. Bengtsonn, “The Swedish Sonderweg in Question,” pp. 18–19.
36. E. Bengtsonn and T. Berger, “Democracy, Inequality, and Redistribution: Evidence from Swedish Municipalities, 1871–1904” (Lund University, 2017).
37. In the United Kingdom from the seventeenth century until 1950, the House of Commons included “university seats,” which essentially allowed graduates of Oxford and Cambridge to vote twice in legislative elections (once in their home constituencies and again as graduates of their respective universities). This system was extended to other universities in 1918 before being definitively abolished in 1950.
38. More specifically, Prussian voters were divided into three classes, chosen so that, taken together, the members of each group paid a third of total tax receipts. Each class then elected a third of the grand electors, who in turn elected the deputies. The Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, and Finland) used fairly standard censitary systems in the nineteenth century and did not seem to have been tempted by the Swedish example. See the online appendix.
39. See E. Hilt, “Shareholder Voting Rights in Early American Corporations,” Business History, 2013.
40. The decisive step was taken in 1876, when the Court of Appeal held that company statutes could do away with any ceiling on voting rights and apply strict proportionality instead. On these very interesting debates, see E. McGaughey, Participation in Corporate Governance (PhD dissertation, Law Department, London School of Economics, 2014), pp. 105–115.
41. See O. Christin, Vox Populi: Une histoire du vote avant le suffrage universel (Seuil, 2014).
43. Another relic of the venality of office is the sale of Paris taxi licenses, but here the logic is no doubt more financial than incentivizing. The licenses yielded large sums to the government when first put up for sale, and the cost of redeeming them now would be significant. This has largely blocked reform of a system that has been widely criticized, for good reason.
44. High military posts also required the posting of a kind of surety bond in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, but this practice was ended in 1871 to widen the social base of recruitment for such posts, apparently with limited effect. See Cannadine, Victorious Century, p. 350.
46. The British series presented here represents work by Atkinson, Harrison, and Lindert as well as more recent work by Alvaredo and Morelli. The Swedish series is based on work by Ohlsonn, Roine, and Waldenström as well as more recent work by Bengtsonn. Unfortunately, the tax records for many other countries go back only as far as World War I, so that it is often difficult to set the shocks due to the war in a longer historical perspective. Wherever the sources allow, however, we find that no clear tendency toward reduction of inequality is visible before the war: this is true of Germany, Denmark, Holland, the United States, and Japan. See the online appendix.
49. See online appendix and T. Piketty, Le capital au XXIe siècle (Seuil, 2013), Figs. 3.1–3.2.