Aristocracies are
pretty much, though not entirely, wiped out in Eastern Europe by a combination
of Stalin and Hitler. In Western Europe they are gone by the middle of the 20th
century. On the whole, it is true that they linger most successfully in Britain
because Britain’s 20th-century history is a less convulsive one than the
histories of almost any other European nation: there is no invasion, there is no
defeat, there is no civil war, there is no scrapping of the constitution and
starting all over again. Britain’s history is more gentle, and under this
circumstance, aristocrats survived longer.Evolving national economies—in 19th-century Britain, for example, the
shift from agrarian to industrial—bring about a reordering of societies and
classes.
While I am not an economic determinist—I do not think things are quite
that simple—the fact is that changing modes of production, as Karl Marx put it,
do bring about changes in social structure and changes in dominant social
groups. One of the challenges for any family, be it a British aristocratic one,
or an American rich one, is how to retain an elite position across long periods
of time when the sources of wealth actually change. There is no doubt that as
economies evolve, modes of production and making money disappear, and they are
replaced by new modes of production and new ways of making money. As a
consequence of that, some elite groups that have benefited from those changes
disappear as the economic structure that made them rich disappears, and new
groups come into being.
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