Businessmen and land ownership in the late nineteenth century

This article analyses the proportions of personal to real estate wealth for a group of 295 businessmen profiled in the Dictionary of business biograph y. It shows that businessmen who owned land on a large scale in the late ni neteenth century were a comparatively small group who retained a small prop ortion of their total wealth in landed assets. Low levels of social mobilit y are identified as a function of land purchase, and new insights are given into the relationship between wealth, status, and land ownership. Any inte gration of business and landed wealth in this period was not a consequence of businessmen becoming landowners.