Nicole Oresme was one of the leading lights of the medieval French academy: a philosopher, a theologian, an astronomer, interpreter of Aristotle and author of influential works on economics and mathematics (he was among the first to propose a graphic representation of data). He was also one of the foremost political theorists of the mixed constitution in the fourteenth century. When towns were roiled by riots in the wake of the Black Death, he counselled Charles V that the wealthy were to blame: ‘They are among the others as God is among men’. Politically, they dominated the municipal assemblies and bent the laws in their favour. The most prudent course of action would be to throw them out of the cities, at once placating the people and exiling potentially powerful enemies of the crown. While he was more eloquent and authoritative than most, the sentiment Oresme was expressing was in fact a medieval commonplace: the super-rich were a political problem. This, on top of the obvious spiritual irritations they introduced to the community by way of greed.

Little more than half a century later, yet on the other side of the great cultural watershed produced by the Black Death and in the full swing of Florentine merchant capitalism’s golden age, the mood had shifted. Poggio Bracciolini, the humanist most famous for his recovery of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, defended the wealthy in his De Avaritia: ‘as among the populations and in the cities which have good traditions it is customary to institute public granaries to distribute wheat in public donations, in the same way it would be very useful to place there many greedy individuals, in order for them to constitute a kind of private barn of money.’ Neo-epicureans found many such functional justifications for the super-rich. Their monumental building habits made cities beautiful and pleasant, humanists often said of their patrons. And by the eighteenth century Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees was haunting the Enlightenment with its claim that conspicuous consumption was the foundation of a society’s wealth and growth, and hence of political order too. At the end of the century, Adam Smith managed to domesticate Mandeville’s provocations by substituting investment, funded by savings and founded on the virtue of thrift, as the spending that kept trade circulating and society stable. That basic theodical move on behalf of the super-rich was the pivot around which the great debates between political economists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned.

Sometime in the middle third of the twentieth century mainstream economists broke with this tradition of justification and convinced themselves that the super-rich were not such a problem after all. Extreme wealth acquired a spectral quality among orthodox social commentators. Simon Kuznets—a Russian-American Nobel laureate in economics, most famous for pioneering national income accounts—popularized the idea of an inequality ‘curve’ over time: the early phases of industrialization increased inequality, as cheap rural labour moved into profitable factories, but declined once capitalists ran out of low-marginal-productivity farmers to exploit. Debates about the legitimacy of the rich could be dissolved in the reassurance that they were a recent phenomenon and a transient one. In his 1985 Nobel lecture, the Italian-American economist Franco Modigliani argued that individuals rationally planned for their ‘life cycles’, accumulating assets late into middle age, then dissaving until death. The idea that anyone might acquire enough wealth to found powerful dynasties was only relevant to perhaps a few families. Not trivial, but of second-order importance: ‘one could come close to accounting for the entire wealth holding of the us without any appeal to the bequest process.’ Any particular rich family, and the rich as a whole, was simply not durable enough to be problematic. Even Marxists, when in a world-historical mood, could be found downplaying the significance of wealthy dynasties, quoting Pirenne’s dictum that ‘for each period into which our economic history may be divided, there is a distinct and separate class of capitalists’. The super-rich were destined to pass away with the next turn of the hegemonic wheel in the world-system.

In the last generation, mainstream economists have corrected this view. There has been a proliferation of new data, and a number of books have appeared over the past decade synthesizing it, most notably Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson’s Unequal Gains (2016), Branko Milanović’s Global Inequality (2016) and Walter Scheidel’s Great Leveller (2017). Inequality has almost always risen over time, and inheritance and dynasties are of overwhelming importance in accounting for capitalism. Empirically, mainstream economists now confess, the only historical forces strong enough to arrest the rise of the rich have been total war, social revolution and plague—and even then not for long. In the nineteenth century, the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population in Western economies saw its share of total wealth grow from 80 per cent to 90 per cent; today, after two world wars, the top decile once again controls between 60 to 70 per cent of total wealth.

Guido Alfani’s new history of the rich thus enters a bleak and crowded field. Taking inspiration from Oresme and Bracciolini, As Gods Among Men distinguishes itself by offering a more extensive and comparative account, drawing on more detailed data. The result is a narrative that is if anything bleaker than its peers. Whereas most data on inequality and the rich have been confined to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Alfani charts the vicissitudes of the super-rich from early modernity, and in the case of several Italian city-states, from the medieval period. This is possible because land, a form of wealth that is difficult to hide, was overwhelmingly the largest asset in most rich people’s portfolios until surprisingly recently. In an unusually detailed census (estimi) from fourteenth-century Florence, the commercialized city-state par excellence, Alfani finds that 53 per cent of wealth was held in the form of land, and another 17 per cent in public debt; exclude urbanites at the very top of the pyramid, and land was more than 90 per cent of Tuscan wealth in 1427. Four centuries later, in 1848, Parisian nobles held 66 per cent of their wealth in land, while the bourgeoisie held 51 per cent; the figure for the upper classes of Milan was 80 per cent. It was only in the first decades of the twentieth century, Alfani finds, that real estate came to comprise less than an outright majority of Parisian millionaires’ wealth. Censuses and property tax records that ‘only’ account for landed wealth are therefore enormously useful, especially for the pre-industrial era. Alfani has painstakingly consulted many of these old documents first-hand. These he added to existing studies of probate inventories, and in the case of Renaissance England the so-called ‘lay subsidies’ (taxes on movable wealth), along with better-known nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources, principally the modern cadaster system introduced across Europe after the French Revolution and ‘rich lists’ such as the ‘Four Hundred’ compiled by New York socialite Caroline Schermerhorn Astor and, more recently, the Forbes 400. By gathering such sources, Alfani provides a more comprehensive picture of the longue durée of the rich in the West than we have had to date.

A professor of economic history at Bocconi University in Milan, Alfani is especially well-placed to study the rich dynasties of early modernity. His department has a strong tradition in that field going back to the 1970s, when scholars associated with the Annales school were prominent members. Alfani’s early work focused on ‘spiritual kinship’ (godparenthood) in early modern Italy, as it transformed under the rigours of counter-reformation Church law: pressured to limit themselves to choosing only two godparents for their children, parents prioritized status and resources over theological tutoring skills, eventually reducing the institution to a mechanism for developing patron-client networks. In the 2010s, Alfani received two and a half million euros in grants from the European Research Council to fund a team to collect the data on wealth that forms the spine of As Gods. He consequently shifted his focus, first to the social and demographic effects of catastrophes, producing a string of technical monographs and edited volumes on pandemics, famines and the effects of siege warfare, later to the long-term continuities revealed in his tax data. This work established his reputation as a meticulous quantitative analyst.

As Gods is an attempt to step beyond specialist journals and synthesize his findings for a wider audience. What makes his message grim, notwithstanding his rather upbeat authorial persona, is that it confirms and augments the picture Piketty drew from data he collected for the long twentieth century: inequality, Alfani shows, has increased almost everywhere since the Black Death. The longest continuous series, Italy, set the pace: the top 10 per cent owned a little less than half of all social wealth in 1450, nearly 60 per cent by 1570, 70 per cent by 1690, and 80 per cent by 1800. The exceptions were the German lands in the seventeenth century, where the rich were permanently held in check by the Thirty Years’ War. Worse, whereas Piketty traced the rise in inequality to the tendency of the rate of return on capital to exceed the growth rate of the economy as a whole (r>g), Alfani’s series show no relationship between inequality trends and growth: the five hundred years of pre-industrial data reveal the same long-term trends in inequality as the nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, without equivalent trends in productivity; nor are any of the growth spurts or periods of stagnation in the early modern era correlated with changes in top wealth shares, which kept climbing regardless. Kuznets’s optimistic notion of inequality as the unfortunate, but temporary, by-product of early industrialization is false in every particular.