In late September 1066, William of Normandy asked his second cousin, Alan Rufus (en français: Alain le Roux), to join the Normans’ fateful war party against the Saxons. Rufus was the second son of a Breton count, at a time when the firstborn son would inherit the title and all the family wealth. It was unlikely that he would prosper if he remained in France. So he enlisted in William’s expedition to England, distinguishing himself as a commander at the Battle of Hastings. After William’s victory, he had himself crowned king, confiscated lands from the Saxon nobility, and doled out their vast estates to his favorites. Rufus received a great deal of property in Cambridgeshire. After he then helped William suppress various Saxon rebellions, he was given a lordship and even more land in Yorkshire (where Rufus’s castle still stands).
Before Rufus died in 1093, the economic historian Guido Alfani informs us in As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West, the combined revenues from his landholdings reached, by one estimate, more than 7 percent of England’s entire national income. That would make Rufus just about the richest person ever to live in England (excluding kings and queens), Alfani writes. One calculation puts Rufus’s wealth, in 2023 dollars, at $242 billion. By comparison, the industrialist Gopichand Hinduja, who topped The Times of London’s 2023 list of the richest Britons, has a combined family wealth of $43 billion, and the cosmetics tycoon Bernard Arnault, who topped Forbes’s 2023 list of the richest people in the world, has a combined family wealth of $211 billion.
Rufus was born into wealth and benefited from a family connection, but he earned most of his fortune through his own labors—that is, by shedding copious quantities of Saxon blood. With the advent of Norman feudalism, this path to wealth largely gave way to the quality of one’s own blood—that is, to being born into nobility. Rufus died childless, but King William’s other favorites left their children staggering quantities of land (and therefore wealth). For some heirs, the inheritance amounted, in today’s dollars, to tens and even hundreds of billions. This was the capital that seeded the English aristocracy.
Nearly a thousand years after the Norman Conquest, the titled fortunes acquired therein are long since dissipated. But if you live in England today and possess a Norman name—Mandeville, Baskerville, Montgomery, Percy, Darcy, Talbot—you’re still likely to be significantly wealthier than someone who does not. Rufus’s lordship passed to his brother Stephen, and, 900-odd years later, to one Allan Le Roux, a South African with addresses in Paris and London who pretty clearly is not hard up for cash. Le Roux is president of Premier Gold Investments, an asset management company that, according to its website, “deals with various single-family offices and high-net worth individuals on a private membership basis only.” Blood will tell….
https://newrepublic.com/article/177555/economists-found-richest-people-time
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Eric Toussaint: Concerning the founding of the Bretton Woods’ Institutions
Lee Camp: The Dark Secret History of Capitalism
Noam Chomsky: Savage capitalist lunatics are running the asylum
After the truth-shower 