AHQ/AHC: Aristocrats and Insutrialists

Okay, this is both an AHC as well as an AHQ, because I’m not sure to what extent this held in actual history. How many Aristocrats made the leap to become industrialists? Did many engage with the industrial economy? Could more have done so? Could they have been persuaded to do so in greater numbers and in more ways? What incentives could have been given, if they weren’t given IOTL, and what were the differences between different countries?

I’m asking this question partly as a thought experiment about the, “ruling classes”. Traditionally, Aristocrats are thought of as the ruling class in European societies beforehand the industrial revolution; I think it’s the same story with industrialists, most regard them as the ruling class in industrial societies. Could the Aristocrats have tried to evolve en Masse and mostly survive the economic and societal transition somewhat intact? Could most of them have shifted the basis of their power from land, towards factories and industry?

I’m guessing this would require an earlier breakup of guild-like mechanisms as well as other things, like assertive monarchs prepared to undermine their land and power based off of land.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
This happened in OTL, and to a very considerable degree. Naturally, there were aristocrats who completely failed to grasp what was happening, but since industry needs funding, and the landed aristocracy had the money, they were often the ones funding industrialisation. And this provided them with a new soure of wealth even as it eclipsed old sources of wealth. (Certain aristocrats invested in other things and opposed industrialisation: note that there were quite a few British aristocrats who supported slavery because they'd gone all-in on Caribbean slavery. When Britain did away with slavery, some of those fools still hadn't learned, and instead invested in the plantation economy of the US South.)

Ultimately, though, quite a lot of aristocrats maintained their wealth and power by investing in industry. Naturally, that industry then became the source of their wealth, and industry -- unlike landed aristocracy -- is relatively accessible to non-aristocratic competitors. Soon, the mass of "wealthy industrialists and financiers" mingled together both aristocrat and non-aristocrat, so "blood" became gradually less important than money itself. The aristocrats who were most opposed to that reality typically did worst, which led them into poverty. which, ironically, forced a lot of them to seek out wealthy American brides to get a new influx of cash: typically daughters of wealthy bourgeois businessmen!

All in all, we can say that a lot of the aristocracy did exactly what you talk aboutin OTL, but this just had the side effect of making their aristocratic status increasingly less important in the grand scheme of things. The primacy of money increasingly displaced the primacy of blood. And then the World Wars happened, really upset the status quo, and that was the death knell for "aristocracy" in any meaningful sense. But even without the wars, a process by which aristocratic blood had become increasingly less relevant had already taken place.
 
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