Surnames, Genetic Selection, and Social Mobility in Pre-Industrial England

A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, argued controversially that in pre-industrial England the rich replaced the poor demographically, and that this helps explain why England became more “bourgeois” in these years: less violent, thriftier, more literate, more numerate. Here evidence from a different source, surnames, confirms the takeover of English society by the economically successful between 1600 and 1851, and the disappearance of the criminal and the poor. A man’s economic success in pre-industrial England predicts a permanent increase of his surname frequency, and hence his gene frequency, by 1851. But the surnames also shows that pre-industrial England was a society of both downward and upward social mobility all the way from at least 1300, with no permanent upper class. In this respect it shows greater social mobility than modern societies such as the USA and Brazil.