The super-rich, through the ages

The title of John Kampfner’s new book is a misnomer; it should have been named ‘The Super-Rich’ for this is how Kampfner collectively refers to the menagerie of billionaires appearing between the covers of this book. And we mustn’t forget that the difference between the rich and the super-rich is the difference between a million and a billion, between a mansion and a mega-mansion, between the 1 per cent and the 0.01 per cent.

The world is fast running out of superlatives to evoke the operational scale of the super-rich lifestyle. When the super-rich win, they build castles for themselves and buy supersonic jets; and when they lose they take the world economy tumbling with them, leaving in their wake not merely a recession but the Great Recession.

The Rich is a wide-ranging history of this class of people, and its field of view is spread out over 2000 years. Kampfner sets the tone for his narrative right at the beginning. The prologue has this passage: “The people who are blamed for the economic crisis and for widening inequality are still living in their parallel worlds, raking in the bonuses, taking their private jets to their private islands, while doling out the odd scrap known as philanthropy.”

So, right at the outset he says this will be no hagiography recounting the ‘success stories’ of the high and mighty. As a result, The Rich comes across as an honest and critical assessment of the lives of the ‘haves and have mores’, their blind pursuit of money and the consistently dubious sources of their wealth. The book is also an attempt to establish historical parallels between the super-rich of ‘Then’ and ‘Now’ qualifying it as a significant work of social anthropology.

In the beginning We begin with a journey back in time. Marcus Licinius Crassus, the Roman general and politician from around 115 BC, is portrayed here as the “ultimate oligarch” and “the first and archetypal member of the club of super-rich”. Crassus was also what we can call the property scamster. In a time when conflagrations in Roman cities were common, Crassus put together a team of fire-fighters and architects from among his slaves who would be despatched to the site of a burning house to make an immediate purchasing deal with the hapless owner.

The house still in flames would be bought for a song, renovated and later sold at a premium. No prizes for guessing that many of these fires were caused by Crassus’ men.

One of the purposes of this inquiry into the history of wealth is to explore the psychology of those who possess it. . If we were to identify some of the dominant character traits of those possessing massive wealth, greed would figure prominently, apart from extreme cunning, a pliable sense of morality, a knack of making influential friends, and an unbeatable talent for reputation laundering.

We are introduced to Mansa Musa, an African monarch from the Middle Ages who had so much wealth that, Kampfner writes, “he was bored with it”. On the way to Mecca with his entourage, Musa gave away such high quantities of gold that its price globally took a nosedive. Here Kamfner reminds us that the kingdom of Mali, which Musa ruled, produced around two-thirds of the world’s gold in the fourteenth century. And the age of European conquest and plunder wasn’t far.

The imperial era, according to Kampfner, “represented a new way of getting rich”. The English and Dutch East India companies were business enterprises that built the foundation of colonial rule in India and Indonesia respectively. Kampfner writes: “This marked the beginning of globalization and these were the first multinationals.”

The dollar factor With Andrew Carnegie and his generation of ‘robber barons’ began the period of the dominance of the American dollar. The chapter on Carnegie is the most gripping of all, partly because of the febrile historical moment it is dealing with.

The American Civil War is on and the stock market is booming, but that’s not all. Carnegie’s era saw battle lines being neatly drawn between rich and poor.

Labour disputes were rife, and industrial magnates like Carnegie (who made his billions through railways and steel) were never willing to give in.

The concept of the 99 per cent, too, has its inception here. This was the first time in history that the issue of inequality had hit a society with such force.

“How could they justify their enormous wealth sitting alongside so much poverty?” Kampfner asks. “How could they explain, historically and socially, what had happened?”

There was another man of Carnegie’s generation who was grappling with these very questions. The American economist Thorstein Veblen’s classic study of the wealthy, The Theory of the Leisure Class , was first published in 1899.

He coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption”, and argued that a “leisure class” was invariably founded upon exploitation, a “predatory habit of mind” and a wasteful display of opulence. In order to safeguard your reputation within the community of wealth, you have to keep showing others that there’s money to spare. In Veblen’s deadpan words, one had to be “pretty consistently wasteful and quite conspicuously so”. Living it up is the preserve of the super-rich: the grander a spending spree, the more ridiculous it begins to seem.

Kampfner gives us several accounts of how billionaires splurge. There’s a puerile undercurrent to the whole enterprise: a childish fascination with size, for instance. Sheikh Mohammad of Dubai buys a yacht that is 162 metres long; Sheikh Khalifa of Abu Dhabi outshines him by buying one just under 200m long In a footnote, Kampfner mentions Muammar Gaddafi’s “Michael Jackson-style Neverland lair” in Libya that contained a “fairground, with a children’s roundabout on which adults could sit in teapots and teacups”.

No one is spared Everyone featured in The Rich — from the economic elite of ancient Egypt to that of contemporary Russia, China and Mexico — gets a drubbing. The final four chapters entitled ‘The Sheikhs’, ‘The Oligarchs’, ‘The Geeks’ and ‘The Bankers’ represent new money that’s fast becoming old. The geeks emerge the cleanest; they have captured what Kampfner calls “the showy world of professional philanthropy” which is still the most effective way of reputation management.

The bankers get spanked the hardest. Kampfner calls them the “pantomime villains” of the recent financial crash, though he admits that many were merely scapegoats. This was a bitter morality play for us all: excess of greed plus the chicanery of a few influential men could send economies crumbling.

When Lehman Brothers went bust, it became the largest bankruptcy in American history, leading to resentment towards the wealthy. So have they learnt their lesson? Kampfner believes that the economic crash, rather than inflicting damage, benefited banks like Goldman Sachs and so, “the old swagger is back”. The Rich shows us that this swagger goes back at least a couple of millennia, and that it’s going to take much more than one Great Recession to break it.

The reviewer is a freelance writer based in Delhi

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