The Rich: From Slaves to Super-Yachts: A 2,000-Year History by John Kampfner (Little, Brown, £25)
Honoré de Balzac claimed that behind every fortune lies a great crime. For John Kampfner, in this history of the super-rich, that is only partially true.
Unfortunately, a nod to the great novelist is as close as we get here to an overarching theory. In a series of amusing accounts of the absurdly wealthy, Kampfner’s book offers a cornucopia of vulgarity, excess and the desperate search for prestige—from Marcus Crassus in late Republican Rome to Bill Gates in late Republican America, taking in Malian monarchs, Renaissance bankers and colonial conquistadors along the way.
The book’s problems lie in just this profusion of examples. Kampfner struggles to persuade us that there really is a thread pulling the examples together. There are some real insights here—such as the observation that many fortunes are founded on the “privatisation” of public wealth, from Robert Clive to Boris Berezovsky. Kampfner also shows how the rich generally try to leverage wealth into prestige, whether through art or charity. But how similar, really, are a 14th-century African king who bankrupts himself endowing a city of mosques, with the denizens of Davos, who pursue stealth wealth and shady influence in the corridors of power?
Such comparisons can plausibly be made, but Kampfner neglects the world of ideas, and particularly the massive changes over recent decades in attitudes to the getting and spending of wealth. Medieval kings pursued riches so they could distribute largesse to their followers and subjects; modern tycoons tend to hoard and hide their wealth. A history of the rich must explain these radical shifts. Nevertheless, while stinting on analysis, Kampfner’s examples still offer the reader an embarrassment of riches.
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