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From the Costs of War Project

There's a lot more in the article, and there's a lot more that can be done with the data that we haven't got around to yet.

Check it out, explore the public version of the data, and please reach out with ideas & suggestions as we continue this work!

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

On a more granular level, the activities which propelled world-magnates to extraordinary wealth and power were often eclectic, and involved various institutional forms and labor arrangements. Contra some expectations, free wage labor was not a prerequisite of innovation or extraordinary profits.

Historically, manufacturing was a minor sector for world-magnates and, even as it boomed in the 19th century, other sectors such as extraction grew as well. Meanwhile trade and finance—capital's most flexible forms—were major areas of extraordinary accumulation across time.

The geographical distribution of world-magnates over time follows some expectations, but with some interesting new insights. For example, we find the Low Countries were far less dominant in the 17th century than we expected.

The data help us rethink key debates about capitalism's historical forms & geographies, and demonstrate that many contemporary trends have historical precedents.

For those who want the quick skim, here are a few key findings.

Long-term studies of capitalist development tend to be limited by data availability, and existing data often reproduce faulty assumptions that can cloud our analysis. As we explain in the article, this new dataset helps overcome these challenges: www.researchgate.net/publication/...

For almost a decade, we've been compiling a dataset of what we call "world-magnates"—the historical analogs of today's billionaires, who have operated in what Braudel termed the "top layer" of economic life. Studying these individuals offers many insights into capitalism's historical development.