YOU NEED MONEY TO MAKE MONEY^261
Stroganoff and Demidoff in Russia; or of rulers such as Prince Wilhelm
Heinrich of Nassau-Saarbriicken (ruled 1740-68).*
Normally such aristocratic entrepreneurs worked with bourgeois
partners, better suited by status and values to do the dirty work—that
is, make the money. (Noblemen are better at spending it.) Sometimes
these commoners profited from business connections to gild their es
cutcheon. Take the rules of aristocratic alliance. In theory, noble mar
ried noble. But what if a commoner was very rich? Well, then, noble
might marry commoner; the higher the noble rank, the more com
fortable the misalliance. (Petty noble families had to be careful about
that kind of thing.) Luck helped, as when a prince Schwarzenberg
(good name), aged thirty-one, married the eighty-two-year-old sole
heiress to a merchant fortune. The lady obligingly died soon after, but
then the young prince died too—"without descendants," of course. So
the estate fell to the main branch of the Schwarzenberg clan, which
went on to prove its spirit of enterprise, not only by its choice of mar
riage partners but by setting up industrial ventures, reclaiming land,
founding an investment bank.^1
Such examples, however striking, fell short of an industrial revolution.
That needed a wider range of sources, including banks and other fi
nancial intermediaries.
Here commercial experience proved a major asset. After centuries of
more or less profitable activity, a network of private banks was in place
(personal firms or partnerships), collectively rich and capable of fi
nancing medium- and long-term investments in industry and choosing
customers not so much by price and terms as by probity, resourceful
ness, above all connections. These groups typically hung on religious
and cultural affinities: the Huguenot-Calvinist, Sephardic-Jewish,
German-Jewish, Greek-Orthodox commercial "families" knew their
own kind—whom to trust and whom to worry about, whom to ask
and whom to work with.^2
These small firms had more scope and surface than met the eye. As
in Britain, bank finance on the Continent typically took the form of
- Some of these families began as commoners (the Demidoff as serfs), built their for
tune in industry, obtained nobility for their services, stayed in industry, and enhanced
their status by a policy of well-chosen marriages. Thus the Wendel iron dynasty became
de Wendel, and while not marrying into the high nobility, found a large reservoir of
talent and pride among very old families of modest means. As one grande dame of me
dieval line, Wendel by marriage, liked to remind listeners (smiling the while, of course),
her people knew her husband as le gros quincailler—the big hardware dealer.