Who were the wealthy, and how did they live? This lecture class follows the rich across five centuries and six continents—through the account books of Augsburg bankers, the credit networks of a Jewish merchant widow in Hamburg, the ledgers of Caribbean slaveholders, the haciendas of Brazilian oligarchs, the oil revenues of the Saudi state, and the offshore accounts of the globalized super-rich. Moving from the moral economies of wealth in 1500 to the passport markets of 2000, we ask not only how great fortunes were made but how they were displayed, defended, transmitted across generations, and concealed or destroyed when the political winds turned. Questions of gender, race, and legal access to property run through every week: who was permitted to accumulate, and on what terms, is always part of the answer to who got rich.

Knowledge

1. Learners will describe how great wealth was accumulated, displayed, and transmitted across diverse societies from 1500 to 2000.
2. Learners will identify the legal, political, and social structures that determined who could accumulate wealth, and on what terms.
3. Learners will recognize key analytical concepts in the historiography of wealth and inequality.
    

Skills

1. Learners will analyze how historians have used primary sources to reconstruct the lives of the wealthy. 
2. Learners will evaluate competing historiographical interpretations of how wealth is made, inherited, and reproduced across different societies.
3. Learners will compare historical arguments across geographic and chronological contexts to assess their transferability.

Values 

1. Learners will form their own views on the relationship between wealth and political power.
2. Learners will reflect on the moral claims the wealthy have made to justify their position and the counterclaims made against them.
3. Learners will consider whether gender, race, and legal structure are contingent barriers to accumulation or structural features of capitalist societies.
4. Learners will practice evidence-based argumentation rather than assumptions when confronting questions about inequality.
    

*There may be changes in the syllabus depending on learning progress and effectiveness

Two short response papers (500 words maximum each), submitted before class in Weeks 4 and 9. Each paper develops one point the student found interesting, surprising, or baffling in (at least) one of the reading materials.

A take-home, open-book final exam, to be completed within 48 hours of distribution. 

None. All are welcome!

1. Mark Häberlein, The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany (University of Virginia Press, 2012).
2. Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Harvard University Press, 1997).
3. Clare Haru Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Duke University Press, 2013).
4. Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (University of California Press, 1998).
5. H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
6. Tom Shachtman, The Founding Fortunes: How the Wealthy Paid for and Profited from America's Revolution (St. Martin's Press, 2019).
7. Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving Port 1727-1892 (Boydell & Brewer, 2004).
8. David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Yale University Press, 1990).
9. Linda Lewin, Politics and Parentela in Paraiba: A Case Study of Family-Based Oligarchy in Brazil (Princeton University Press, 1987).
10. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia,” The Journal of Modern History 65, no. 4 (1993): 745–70.
11. Madawi Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
12. Vanessa Ogle, “Archipelago Capitalism: Tax Havens, Offshore Money, and the State, 1950s–1970s,” American Historical Review 122, no. 5 (2017): 1431–1458.
13. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Duke University Press, 1999).