Social capital and elite persistence in late Victorian and Edwardian England

Noble, Aurelius (2024) Social capital and elite persistence in late Victorian and Edwardian England. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis investigates the persistence of elites amidst the rapid changes of late nineteenth century Britain. It gathers new data and employs new methods to examine the complexities of persistence in both economic and social terms. The research is motivated by the historical literature on aristocratic decline, the economic history literature on social mobility, and the financial history literature on merchant banking. Methodologically, it leverages ‘Big Data’ approaches to economic history and quantitative network analysis. It attempts to combine a nuanced historical debate, which captures complex phenomena like identity and class, with robust, systematic measurement. The first paper examines the persistence of the titled aristocracy. I collect and digitise new data on the population of wealth-holders for this period (2.2m), linking this with genealogical information on the population of title-holders. This allows for the construction of several new measures of aristocratic persistence. Titleholders were uniquely persistent in terms of wealth-holding, regressing towards a higher mean than other wealth elites. In social terms the aristocracy was marked by a remarkable openness to outsiders. This was partly in response to a crisis in the 1880s, but primarily a long-standing process which allowed for the controlled admission of new wealth into the aristocracy. The second paper investigates the role of bankers within elite London members’ clubs. I collect and digitise 43k club membership records, constructing an interclub membership network. I then use network analysis to examine changes to the participation, influence and integration of bankers in High Society. This suggests that there was a small ‘banking aristocracy’, which already held close ties to the titled aristocracy at the start of the period. Despite receiving more titles, this group did not become more socially prominent, it was already near the apex. There was no change to the status of bankers en masse as a professional group. The third paper explores relationships between merchant banks in the acceptance market, a form of short-term trade credit. Creating a new biographical dataset of 105 leading merchant bankers, it builds four inter-bank networks. One network captures client-sharing between banks, while the other three capture professional or social connections between partners at those banks. This shows a correlation between client sharing and these inter-personal connections. These findings suggest that collaboration and information sharing played an important role in the development and structure of the London money market.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Aurelius Noble
Library of Congress subject classification:	D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform
Sets:	Departments > Economic History
Supervisor:	Accominotti, Olivier and Cummins, Neil
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4717

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