Life after death: how successful nineteenth-century businessmen disposed of their fortunesстатья из журнала
Аннотация: One of the nicer ironies of social history is that David Ricardo, having produced the economic theory that defined a sharp class division between the parasitic landed aristocracy and the industrious and productive sections of society, both middle and working classes, at once proceeded to join the parasites himself. Having amassed a large fortune as a stockbroker, financier, and loan contractor, Ricardo entered the land market in a big way in i8I4, and in the last ten years of his life laid out ?275,000 in the purchase of landed estates. His first purchase, the Gatcombe Park estate in Gloucestershire, of over 5,ooo acres, furnished him with a country house residence, and in his later years in business and in Parliament he divided his time between Gatcombe and his town house in Upper Brook Street. He did not seek to sever his connections with the financial world and withdraw into country isolation, and indeed at his death in i823 the major part of his assets, in the region of ?700,000, was in personalty, chiefly in investments in the French funds and in loans on mortgage. He demonstrated in his own person, in fact, that it was perfectly possible to be simultaneously a member of the upper middle class and of the landed aristocracy. But he did not buy the Gatcombe estate simply as an agreeable convenience, for the pleasure of country relaxation when the time of life for unremitting attention to business had passed, although it no doubt was that; it was also a step in status and a help in entering the Commons in i8i9. Nor were his other land purchases simple investments, although his own theory of rent might well have suggested the long-term advantages in income and capital appreciation of investing in land. Indeed, from I8I5 he retained Edward Wakefield as his land market consultant, and heeded Wakefield's advice that 'your great object should be purchasing in the neighbourhood of where you already possess property, or else large estates which lays compact'. Wakefield therefore criticized Ricardo's second i8I4 purchase, of the small Dalchurst estate near Tonbridge in Kent, as 'a bad purchase and away from everything else and gives none of that consequence which would attach to it did it join other estates.' Hence his subsequent purchasing policy was directed towards the area around Gatcombe, and he acquired four more estates in the Gloucester-Worcester-Hereford borderlands which built up his landholding to well over io,ooo acres. In one respect, however, Ricardo showed his resistance to the aristocratic culture, for he aspired to found not one landed family, but three. His will,
Год издания: 1990
Авторы: F. M. L. Thompson
Издательство: Wiley
Источник: The Economic History Review
Ключевые слова: Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 43
Выпуск: 1
Страницы: 40–61