THE RICH
From Slaves to Super Yachts: A 2000-year History
John Kampfner
Little, Brown (Printed in India by Hachette India)
401 pages; Rs 599
The fictional character Gordon Gekko, from the Hollywood classic Wall Street, said, "Greed, for want of a better word, is good." The people whose lives John Kampfner - a former editor of New Statesman, the British weekly - has chronicled in The Rich are living embodiments of this sentiment. The book is a scathing account of the smash-and-grab tactics used by the super-rich over the past two millennia to accumulate wealth.
The Rich has a fascinating cast of characters, with a chapter devoted to each. The fact that each chapter is a self-contained episode, and can be read without reference to the one preceding or succeeding it, makes the book an easy read. Among them are Marcus Licinius Crassus of ancient Rome (a patron of Julius Caesar), known to be the richest man in Rome's history; Alain Le Roux, a henchman of William the Conqueror who took part in the Normans' ethnic cleansing of north-eastern England and had become master of 250,000 acres of land by the time he died; Cosimo de' Medici, the Florentine banker to whom popes were in hock; the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, who had the Inca king strangled despite being presented with enough gold to fill a room 22 feet long and 17 feet wide; the Sun kings Louis XIV of France and Akhenaten, Pharaoh of Egypt (who wanted glory more than riches); Robert Clive of the English East India Company, who told the English Parliament that he was astonished by how moderate his dash for cash had been; the Krupps, steel barons and arms merchants; the robber baron Andrew Carnegie; Mobutu Sese Seko, the Congolese dictator who was known as "the walking bank vault"; the sheikhs of the United Arab Emirates; Russia's oligarchs; America's tech billionaires and the United States bankers who gained notoriety in the wake of the financial meltdown of 2007-2008.
Rich lists are common enough in publications such as The Sunday Times and Forbes, so why a book? Mr Kampfner writes that he wanted to get at the truth behind the lists - the methods the rich use to accumulate their wealth, which the magazines typically ignore. He quotes United States Congressional statistics to show that between 1979 (the eve of Ronald Reagan's election) and 2007 (the start of the crash), American incomes increased overall by 62 per cent, while the top one per cent saw their incomes increase by 275 per cent. During the financial meltdown followed by the Great Recession, he writes, the vast majority had to tighten their belts, while the super-rich "weathered the storm with consummate ease". Ditto for Britain.
If the aim was to write about "the haves and the have-mores" (a phrase made memorable by former United States president George W Bush), why go 2,000 years back in history? The aim, Mr Kampfner writes, is to show that the present era is by no means uniquely unequal and divisive - this narrative has been with us through the ages. His account makes it clear that the early super-rich built up their wealth by plunder pure and simple. With time, the methods began to vary, with the tendency to build monopolistic positions becoming important in the age of the robber barons, and continuing through to the rich geeks, such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Another method commonly used to gain instant wealth was buying up privatised state industrial empires on the cheap, in a brazen display of crony capitalism - Russia's oligarchs being a prime example.
Significantly, there is not a single woman in Mr Kampfner's rich list. The males-only list, he writes, is intended to send a deliberate message: "That the vast majority of women who might be considered super-rich in history have acquired wealth through either marriage or inheritance. For the past two thousand years it is men who have made, and hoarded, wealth in societies that have been exclusively patriarchal." But the author is convinced that if a future version of this book is written in five or 10 years' time, this imbalance will be corrected.
Mr Kampfner is at pains to point to the strong foundation that "social capital" - natural resources, infrastructure, technology, access to good education, the rule of law and good government - provides the super-rich in their quest for wealth. Sadly, Warren Buffett alone among the super-rich featured in the book has acknowledged the social advantages that enabled him to accumulate his fabled wealth.
To Mr Kampfner, the efforts of the super-rich to contribute to charities and set up foundations for development are, with some honourable exceptions, efforts at laundering reputations, and pretty successful ones at that. Andrew Carnegie, for example, is known today less as a rapacious capitalist and robber baron, and more as a man who gave away his entire fortune, setting up libraries, museums and educational institutions. For that matter, does anyone today recall Bill Gates' run-ins with regulators in both the United States and the European Union? He is remembered more for his donations and the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The concluding sentence of the prologue to the book is withering in its sarcasm: "No matter how they made their money, they have created legacies that are often kinder to them than they deserve."
