“Billionaires” and Capitalist Development in World-Historical Perspective

The extraordinary increase in the number and wealth of billionaires in the past two decades has yielded a groundswell of analyses of the shifting patterns of economic growth around the globe and the reconfiguration of transnational elites. But data limitations have hampered attempts to situate these trends in world-historical context. This paper introduces a new data set to begin overcoming such limitations. This original data set provides relevant information on what we call “world-magnates”: the wealthiest individuals in the capitalist world-system from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, who can be understood as the structural and historical analogs to today’s billionaires. The data not only identify the “who,” “when,” and “where” of these magnates but also capture information on the diverse innovations in technology, organizations of production, labor arrangements, and relationships to state power that were associated with the presence of these individuals at the pinnacle of wealth over time. In this contribution, we introduce the first version of this new data set, describe the data-collection procedures and methodological approach, present some aggregate trends derived from the data, and conclude by outlining how this data set can be used to help overcome some persistent challenges to the study of capitalist development in a world-historical perspective.