Life hacks from history: how to get rich
Pssst! Fancy making some cash? Justin Pollard tells us what we can learn from the lives of history’s wealthiest individuals, and why it takes much more than brains and brawn to make lots of money
If history could really teach us how to get rich, you’d likely be reading Tatler rather than this. But history can certainly give us some tips on what not to do. In the British Isles, the first people to amass great personal wealth lived during the Bronze Age. Unlike the Neolithic period, when most people were laid to rest in communal tombs, wealthy individuals were interred in individual burial mounds, each filled with precious objects they chose to take with them to the next life. Since that time, it seems that everyone has been competing with each other to get their hands on the most ‘stuff’.
The easiest method is to steal from someone else. Few have been better at this than Adam Worth, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s model for Moriarty (the enemy of Sherlock Holmes), who had a knack of walking into people’s houses and taking what he fancied. But be careful – when Worth stole Gainsborough’s famous portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, he fell in love with it and refused to sell it on – much to the annoyance of his gang.
Risky business
Fraud is perhaps subtler than burglary, the South Sea Bubble of 1720 being a stock fraud that even took in Isaac Newton, who lost nearly £3.5m in modern terms on the scam. And that’s nothing compared to the $15m that was stolen in the original ‘Ponzi’ scheme orchestrated by con artist Charles Ponzi, or the whopping $64bn stolen by disgraced financier Bernie Madoff. But again, be careful. After the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer was sent to the Tower of London, while Ponzi and Madoff were also incarcerated for
their scams.
If crime isn’t your thing, perhaps you could try inheriting the cash instead. In 1677, Sir Thomas Grosvenor married Mary Davies. He was 21, she was, erm, 12 (although that wasn’t unusual for the time). However, what motivated Sir Thomas was not Mary herself, but the 500 acres of land she had inherited to the west of London. Centuries later, the land became Mayfair, Park Lane and Belgravia, and the Grosvenor heirs – as dukes of Westminster – were set for life.
If you don’t have rich relatives, you could always try hunting for money. In 2021, an auctioneer found a copy of the US Declaration of Independence in an attic, which later sold for $4.5m. And if that’s not enough, you could try searching at sea: the treasure haul from the shipwreck code-named ‘Black Swan’, found in 2007, contained 17 tonnes of coins valued at $500m.
The cost of greed
If all else fails, you might have to take the hard route and earn your fortune. Casanova made his money not from love, but from running the French National Lottery, while German banker Jakob Fugger (known as ‘Fugger the Rich’) created the world’s first news service to help him get ahead of events and make financial decisions. His fortune was equivalent to 2 per cent of the entire gross domestic product of Europe.
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Finally, a word of warning. It is possible to get too rich. In the early 20th century, Osman Ali Khan, the last nizam (monarch) of Hyderabad, possessed more than $100m in gold and silver bullion, and $400m in jewellery. But all that wealth brought problems in the form of at least 100 grandchildren, all keen to get a share of the dwindling fortune. And then there’s probably the richest person who has ever lived, Mansa Musa of Mali. In 1324 he set off on a pilgrimage to Mecca carrying so much gold that his wild spending in places like Cairo caused rampant inflation – and depressed the economies he travelled through for a generation.
So, if it’s possible for riches to make us poor, then perhaps history is telling us to stop trying to get rich in the first place.
This article was first published in the September 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
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