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Businessmen and land ownership in the late nineteenth century
Author(s) -
Nicholas Tom
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
the economic history review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.014
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1468-0289
pISSN - 0013-0117
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0289.00117
Subject(s) - real estate , land tenure , estate , biography , business , period (music) , scale (ratio) , market economy , economic history , economics , economy , geography , finance , political science , law , archaeology , art , agriculture , aesthetics , cartography
This article analyses the proportions of personal to real estate wealth for a group of 295 businessmen profiled in the Dictionary of business biography . It shows that businessmen who owned land on a large scale in the late nineteenth century were a comparatively small group who retained a small proportion of their total wealth in landed assets. Low levels of social mobility are identified as a function of land purchase, and new insights are given into the relationship between wealth, status, and land ownership. Any integration of business and landed wealth in this period was not a consequence of businessmen becoming landowners.