Welcome
Christian Huck (BritCult Chair)

Introductory Remarks
Oliver v. Knebel Doeberitz (Organiser)

BritCult Award
Gabriele Linke (Jury Chair)

BritCult Award: Eulogy
Joachim Frenk (Jury Member)

Housekeeping Announcements
Jonatan Jalle Steller (Organiser)

Chair: Dietmar Böhnke (Leipzig)

Infrastructures of Plutocratic London
Caroline Knowles (London)

This keynote discusses enactments of wealth in streets and neighbourhoods of London. Using a spatial and biographical approach, with walking as a key practice, the talk focuses on ‘plutocratic London’ and its urban infrastructure. It investigates how the super-rich generate and consume their wealth through financial instruments and luxury consumption, all set in the relevant London streets, and ultimately asks how fragile this system of gated communities, luxury developments, mansions, and gentlemen's clubs is. The talk is derived from Knowles' forthcoming book Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, to be published by Allen Lane.

Caroline Knowles kindly agreed to give this keynote lecture when our original speaker had to cancel at the last minute due to illness.

Chair: Jonathan Rose (Passau)

The Super-Rich as Technological Fixes
Sebastian Berg (Bochum)

My paper will look into discourses around a specific type of philanthropic activity some of the super-rich engage in: saving humanity and the planet. Individuals such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson have intervened into debates on environmentalism and on promising measures to ameliorate climate change for some time now. Their suggestions on technological fixes such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and the generation of electrical power by nuclear fusion mirror their economic and entrepreneurial activities and are characterized by a belief in their own sheer unlimited possibilities. Thus, I will show that their philanthropic interventionism is based on the same ideological premises as their business activities. In addition, I would like to discuss the following: that their interventions are taken seriously in British and American society (and elsewhere), testifies to the hegemony of a couple of ideological imaginaries: the effectiveness of simple solutions for large-scale problems, the superiority of the knowledge of ‘experts’, the indispensability of powerful and successful business people for the solution of global problems, the compatibility of capitalism and an ecologically-friendly reorganization of economic activity, the possibility to keep or increase current levels of wealth while saving the biosphere needed for human species survival. I will argue that a different evaluation of the super-rich and, more generally, of global wealth differentials and class antagonisms in essential for a more realistic project of societal and technological transformation. Hence, the paper will invite to a reappraisal of class analysis and an alternative hedonism (Kate Soper) that moves beyond the mixture of envy and admiration that often accompanies representations of the super-rich.

Super-Villains or Idealists? Representations of the Super-Rich in the Contemporary Public Sphere
Carolin Gebauer (Wuppertal)

In popular culture, the super-rich are often presented as villains. As different as the antagonists of James Bond and Sherlock Holmes may be, they all share one particular feature: they have money, and lots of it. A similar bias manifests itself in public discourses: The BBC documentary The Super-Rich and Us stages the top 0.01 percent of British society as the egotistic ‘other,’ and an opinion feature in The Guardian accuses them of “hav[ing] made Britain into a nation of losers” (Chakrabortty). ‘Common’ British people seem to agree that the global super-rich have a negative influence on society in that they cause the middle class to stagnate while elitist wealth increases.

The economic elite, however, defend themselves against such reproaches, emphasizing their contribution to the public good: Not only does their consumerism help society to prosper (trickle-down effect), but they also seek to improve the world. Most recently, for example, billionaires such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos have repeatedly made headlines for submitting various “plan[s] [of how] to save the world from the climate crisis” (Milman and Rushe).

This paper seeks to explore the differences between auto- and altero-representations of the super-rich in British media. By analyzing selected examples – i.e. written newspaper features, documentaries, and Tweets – I will show that the narrative strategies used in both identity discourses (e.g. the “battle” metaphor or the opposition of “us” vs. “them”) challenge the notion of social cohesion and thus widen the social and cultural gap between the rich and middle class. Such divisive rhetoric, I will argue, hinders the fight against inequality as it maintains an ideology that lies at the heart of what Colin Crouch has termed “post-democracy.”

• Chakrabortty, Aditya. “The Super-Rich Have Made Britain into a Nation of Losers.” The Guardian, 6 Aug. 2019.
• Crouch, Colin. Post-Democracy. Polity, 2004.
• Crouch, Colin. Post-Democracy after the Crises. Polity, 2020.
• Milman, Oliver, and Dominic Rushe. “The Latest Must-Have among US Billionaires? A Plan to End the Climate Crisis.” The Guardian. 25 Mar. 2021.
• Peretti, Jacques. The Super-Rich and Us. Episodes 1–2, directed by Chris Boulding, BBC Two, 2017.

Chair: Oliver v. Knebel Doeberitz (Leipzig)

The Richest Man on Earth: Between Centrality and Marginality
Rainer Emig (Mainz)

Even experts on British Culture might not have heard of John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute (1847-1900). Nonetheless, he was regarded as the richest man on earth in the 1860s. He was instrumental in completing Cardiff Docks, which turned a small town in Wales into the world’s most important export hub for coal. His wealth was thus not merely inherited, but entwined with the global Industrial Revolution.

At the same time this central figure in emerging modern capitalism was by no means undisputed and “centric”. He converted to Catholicism aged 21, which shocked his contemporaries and persuaded Benjamin Disraeli to model the eponymous protagonist of his novel Lothair (1870) on him. Crichton-Stuart himself also published widely as an amateur scholar. He amassed money, but also spent it liberally, especially on Neo-Gothic buildings, including parts of Cardiff Castle and nearby Castle Coch. A keen traveller, he nonetheless retained ties with both his Scottish origins and his Welsh home. Cardiff elected him mayor and his Scottish hometown Provost twice. Besides making South Wales a global centre of Industrialisation, he also supported Scottish Home Rule.

A Cultural Studies positioning of this phenomenon must be intersectional and cover history, economics, politics, religion, but also art history, architecture, literature, and popular culture. Yet can this model provide answers to the question how someone so central to his time can simultaneously be so marginal? Does privilege provided by ancient titles and newly acquired wealth hold together the dissimilar parts? Or can Crichton-Stuart’s eccentricity teach us how culture finds ways of “integrating” even basic contradictions into acceptable and established patterns – when there is an interest and will to do so?

Victorian Interiors and the ‘Noble Arts’: Morris & Co. at Clouds
Stefanie John (Braunschweig)

To the Victorian designer, manufacturer, poet, socialist and proto-environmentalist William Morris, tapestry was “the noblest of the weaving arts” (Morris 17). The pictorial tapestries made by his company Morris & Co. at the turn of the century belong to the most spectacular (and expensive) handmade textiles to emerge from the Arts and Crafts Movement. In spite of Morris’s socialist principles, they decorated the homes of the wealthiest members of society. This paper takes its impetus from one such textile work, the Greenery tapestry, a verdure panel commissioned for Clouds House in Wiltshire and designed by Henry Dearle for Morris & Co. in 1892. I will approach the tapestry as both an artwork and a product of material culture and argue that its fabrication and texture are laced with late Victorian ideas of class and commodification, decoration and taste, interiority and environment.

Starting out from Morris’s notion of “the noblest” craft, I will discuss the tapestry’s luxurious design and contextualise Greenery as an object custom-made for Clouds, the country home of Sir Percy Wyndham and his wife Madeline. Morris’s furnishings helped to stage the home as spectacle, in line with the notion of the “house beautiful” celebrated by aesthetes of fin-de-siècle England. But they also represent the pinnacle of Morris’s somewhat utopian effort to improve working conditions and to think carefully about materials and their function and environment. Like the history of Clouds House itself (it was designed by Philip Webb and, in the course of its existence, burned down, was rebuilt, bequeathed, sold and resold; today it houses a treatment centre for recovering addicts), Morris’s tapestry serves as a reminder that notions of wealth, the home and “the elite” must be thought of as a multi-layered, contradictory and historically changeable phenomena.

• Morris, William. “Textiles.” Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society: Catalogue of the First Exhibition, edited by the Arts & Crafts Exhibition Society, 1888, pp. 17-29.

Chair: Ellen Grünkemeier (Bielefeld)

“… all the gold / coin’d in rich Barbary”: Oriental Wealth and English Diplomacy and Trade on the Late Elizabethan Stage
Marcus Hartner (Bielefeld)

In 1591, the Moroccan ruler Ahmad al-Mansur launched a risky but highly profitable invasion of the West African Songhay Empire. After managing to cross the Sahara against all expectations, his troops defeated the unprepared Songhay army and captured the wealthy cities of Gao and Timbuktu on the Sudanese trade route. When the Songhay Empire collapsed as a result of this victory, local authorities not only submitted to send “a tribute of 100,000 pieces of gold and 1,000 slaves to Marrakesh” (Matar 147), but much of the wealth and gold from the trade route became subsequently diverted to Morocco, turning al-Mansur into one of the richest rulers on the African continent and earning him the title al-Dhahabī (the golden). The immense wealth flowing into Morocco immediately attracted the attention of European traders and politicians. In England, for example, the crown renewed its diplomatic efforts to draw the Moroccan ruler into an alliance against Spain. And “Marrakesh soon teemed with English, French, Flemish, Italian and Spanish merchants, each seeking al-Mansur’s favour and approaching him with requests for [trade] monopolies” (MacLean and Matar 55). Moreover, al-Mansur’s wealth and political influence captured the popular imagination and it found its way, for example, onto the early modern London stage.

My presentation will discuss popular representations of the Moroccan ruler, for example in Thomas Heywood’s popular play The Fair Maid of the West, Part I (c. 1597-1603) in the context of the emergence of what historians have referred to as “new capitalism” (Cerasano 15) and the increasing early modern expansion of international commodity exchange. I am going to argue that while the popular fascination with al-Mansur certainly draws on stereotypical notions of excessive Oriental wealth that had been a stock feature of the Western imagination of the Muslim world since the Middle Ages, the dramatic representation of the Moroccan ruler presents a polyvalent figure that both evokes and defies stereotypical notions of Muslim otherness.

• Cerasano, Susan P. “Economics.” A Concise Companion to English Renaissance Literature, edited by Donna B. Hamilton, Blackwell, 2006, pp. 11‐31.
• MacLean, Gerald M., and Nabil I. Matar. Britain and the Islamic World: 1558–1713. Oxford UP, 2011.
• Matar, Nabil I. “The Maliki Imperialism of Ahmad al-Mansur: The Moroccan Invasion of Sudan, 1591.” Imperialisms: Historical and Literary Investigations, 1500-1900, edited by Rajan Balachandra and Elizabeth Sauer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 147-162.

Take Back the Playground of the Rich: Exploring the Public Opposition to Private Sport Clubs in Post-Colonial Hong Kong
Ha Chi Yeung (Hong Kong)

Exclusive private sports clubs with privileged membership are places that not only offer recreational and social activities but also reinforce social capital and network ties of the wealthy communities, contributing to the reproduction of social inequality. Public opposition and protests against the development of private sports clubs are not new phenomena and can be found throughout the world. However, the issue of provision of land for these affluent clubs is more contentious and complex in Hong Kong, a former British colony, because they have benefited from the government's preferential land policy, a colonial legacy of privilege. The civil society in Hong Kong has called for the resumption of these clubs for other more urgent and public purposes, such as providing public housing and parks. Such calls had since led to a series of protests. While studies have invoked the lens of political ecology, neoliberalism and environment movements to analyse these resistance movements, few, if any, attempts to view the phenomena as a colonial legacy.

This study aims to plug this research gap and explore the politics over these privileged clublands, over the controversies and public oppositions against the existing policy and their continuity. This study starts from tracing the colonial origins, development trajectory of these clubs and the culture of clubbability in Hong Kong. Various forms of protests and resistance against these private sports clubs will also be investigated and categorized. This study further explores the discourse of opponents and proponents of these clubs by analyzing newspaper reports and interviews with them.

Chair: Rainer Emig (Mainz)

In Between Cultural Heritage and ‘Playground’ for the Wealthy: The Evolution of the British Countryside
Felix Behler (Paderborn)

The history of the English countryside has never been just a history of style or taste. In early modern times, the English landscape began to change pivotally due to the nascency of magnificent châteaux and extensive gardens. Throughout the 17th and 18th century, these architectures developed an idiosyncratic style which eventually came to be known as the ‘English Country House’ and the ‘English Landscape Garden.’ In this paper, I will consider the evolution of these spaces from a socio-historical point of view, taking a closer look at the function|s and symbolism|s of country houses and gardens – both in the past and in the present. Surely, besides marking significant upheavals in English architectural history, these spaces have been – and still are – intimately interwoven with politics, culture, and identity. When throughout the 17th century an array of novel building projects began to change the looks of the countryside, the most essential function of these massive estates was to visualise the owner’s political and economic hegemony. After the establishment of a more potent parliament that sprang from the Revolution of 1688/9, “[m]aintaining a grip on the electoral system required not only high rank and wealth, but also that these should be made visible. A country house, garden and park […] would act as a visible confirmation of the owner’s spending power” (Jacques 118). Though, throughout the latter centuries, outright plutocratic tendencies declined, even today, the countryside remains a fairly ‘bourgeois’ space – at least in part. Nowadays, it often appears divided between sites of national-cultural heritage and ‘playgrounds’ for the wealthier sections of society. Beyond doubt, maintaining a historical estate constitutes a rather costly affair; that is why those ancient estates deemed to be ‘more important’ are most commonly (co-)owned by trust-organisations such as the National Trust (est. 1894) and thus opened to a wider public. Often opposed to the meticulous reconstruction of trust-funded sites – like, e.g., Newton (17th cen.), Stowe (18th cen.), or Polesden (19th/early 20th cen.) – other historical estates either decayed or remained in private hands, often modernised and converted into hotels and clubs, or still serving as private homes which are, as Clive Aslet puts it mildly, “larger than the national average” (par. 5). In addition to that, since the 1980s, there has been an ascent of new building projects. After a short period of suspected decline, the cult of the English country estate seemed to experience a renaissance, culminating in the beginning of the new millennium when, apparently, it had become de rigeur, especially for international super-rich, to acquire an ‘English arcadia’ (cf. ibid. par. 11). Specifically, in 2020, the year that was so decisively hallmarked by COVID-19, international billionaires appeared to develop an ever more growing penchant for retreats in the English countryside (cf. Tingle).

• Aslet, Clive. “The Country House Today.” The New Criterion, vol. 38, no. 1, 2019, p. 13.
• Jacques, David. Gardens of Court and Country: English Design 1630-1730. Yale UP, 2017.
• Tingle, Rory. “Global Super-Rich Snap Up British Country Estates […].” Daily Mail, 12 Nov. 2020.

“Envied simplicity; venerable ignorance; plenteous poverty!” Fighting the Super-Rich in the Welsh Countryside
Sophia Moellers (Dortmund)

While the visibility of the super-rich has recently skyrocketed, the criticism of the affluence of a select few has been a central concern for socio-political activists for centuries. Catalysed by the capitalist exploitations of marginalised individuals in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and transgressively exceeding national borders in the spread of colonialist oppression, notions of anticapitalism and calls for a redistribution of wealth were already brought to public attention during the Long 18th Century. In London’s radical circles, predominantly in the heated debates of the London Corresponding Society during the 1780/90s (cf. Thompson 20), pre-Marxist ideas with calls for individual freedom took shape.

The proposed paper seeks to discuss the anticapitalist discourses of the 1780/90s with special reference to William Godwin’s often-overlooked Imogen, A Pastoral Romance, as the novella joins simplicity and virtue in a juxtaposition with immense wealth and consequential amorality. When the frugal maiden Imogen is kidnapped from the picturesque Welsh countryside by goblin magician and despotic ruler Roderic, inhabiting a wondrous kingdom full of excessive luxuries, the wits of industrious shepherds are tested in their opposition to and demasking of “superfluous riches” (Godwin 217). Celebrated for his Political Justice, Godwin’s early work already displays a poignant engaging with the devaluation and alienation of individuals in the face of immense wealth. Framed as a pastoral romance, Imogen satirises modern primitivism, the exploitation of the lower orders and the seemingly supernatural powers of the super-rich, as they employ their wealth to oppress the poor. Given its display of anticapitalist ideas, criticism of luxury and a call for redistributions of wealth, the text mirrors the discourses on property and individual value of the 1780/90s, which were essential in the development of Marxism and pathbreaking for the emergence of the working class (cf. Thompson 11, 271).

• Godwin, William. “Imogen: A Pastoral Romance in Two Volumes from the Ancient British.” Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, edited by Pamela Clemit, Routledge, 2016, pp. 163-267.
• Thompson, Edward P. The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage, 1966.

Chair: Jonatan Jalle Steller (Leipzig)

British Royalty: Celebrities between Duty and Money
Jürgen Ronthaler (Leipzig)

Monarchs have, historically, always belonged to the ‘super-rich’ - or at least this was assumed and pretended. Of course, this wealth was mostly bound to a royal status, as King Lear so aptly reminds us. But even reigning European monarchs were known to have borrowed more than they have literally possessed over the centuries – at least in ready money or valuables. To ‘own’ one's crown jewels is a fairly recent thing. Of the monarchies left in the world, the Queen and her family doubtlessly still fare well in both status and riches.

But even the British Royal family cannot sustain a life in exuberant wealth any more, since substantial assets are bound by belonging to the Crown or coming from the taxpayer's allowance. And incomes derived from formerly ‘personal possessions’ like the Duchy of Cornwall have at least to be shown to be used for reasonable purposes serving the common good.

While public opinion, heated up by media coverage, expects the Royals major and minor to show (off) their status, the basis for this show becomes less financially stable or self-determined. Especially younger core members of the ‘firm’ thus are drawn into an unbridgeable gap between displaying their position as a royal celebrity and (not) earning the income to support this position. The paper will investigate the inevitability of this challenge, illustrate it with recent examples, and try to extract a possible ‘thin line’ on which the future of the monarchy may depend.

Masters of a Universe in Crisis: Neoliberal Financial Speculation and Collapse in (Ex-)Investment Bankers’ Confessionals
Ronja Waldherr (Aachen)

The neoliberal deregulation of financial markets since the 1980s accounts for the cultural ascent of a transnational nouveau riche figure among the wealthiest one per cent: the investment banker. With this group, notions of excess that are central to the semiotics of great wealth have not been primarily constructed around (unmerited) privilege but around opaque masterminding of the globalised political economy. As multinational financial corporations (un)make and shift clients' wealth on a scale that affects populations globally, the 2008 Great Financial Crisis (GFC) is only the latest fallout from high-risk trading with complex financial products.

A recent cycle of (ex-)investment bankers' ‘confessionals’ situated in U.S., UK and German contexts of financial collapse – the bestselling autobiographies The Accidental Investment Banker (2007) and For the Love of Money (2016), as well as Marc Bauder's documentary Master of the Universe (2013) – promise to combine the insider's (well-informed, ‘authentic’) and the dropout's (morally reformed) perspectives into a scathing exposure of wealth accumulation in the neoliberal financial economy. Having once embodied the ideal homo oeconomicus – generating enormous return on high-risk investments in uncertain futures –, the authors now variously address the (self-)destructiveness of this figure's boundless quest for capital accrual.

Adopting a framework of constructivist IPE scholarship and critical theory, I argue that the memoirs do not, however, dismantle the political economic status quo but manage its now all too visible (communitised) costs. At least two interlocking discursive strategies derail discussions of (missing) systemic market reform: firstly, the narrative dynamics of scandal do “touch […] on real sources of power” but unfold through the spectacular exposure of individual moral corruption (Hozic and True 9); and secondly, a therapeutic register of struggle with ‘wealth addiction’ and spiritual self-transformation frames reform of individuals as well as (financial) institutions not in terms of political economics but mental health.

• Hozic, Aida A. and Jacqui True. “Making Feminist Sense of the Global Financial Crisis.” Scandalous Economics: Gender and the Politics of Financial Crises, edited by idem, Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 1-17.
• Knee, Jonathan A. The Accidental Investment Banker: Inside the Decade that Transformed Wall Street. Wiley, 2007.
• Master of the Universe. Directed by Marc Bauder, bauderfilm, 2013.
• Polk, Sam. For the Love of Money: A Memoir of Family, Addiction, And a Wall Street Trader's Journey to Redefine Success. Simon & Schuster, 2016.

Chair: Dietmar Böhnke (Leipzig)

Bunkering Down? The Geography of Elite Residential Basement Development in London
Roger Burrows (Newcastle)

Much has been written about the “luxified skies” that, until recently, have been sprouting up across London; “high-rise”, “super-prime” housing for the very wealthy. Thus far, less attention has been paid to what has been happening to the subterranean city. The “luxified skies” are highly visible reminders of elite “verticality” but, what we might term, “luxified troglodytism” is also an important aspect of the changing geometries of wealth, power and architecture. In this paper, we map out in detail the emerging subterranean geography of residential basement development across London since 2008. The very wealthy, it turns out, have been “bunkering down” across certain parts of London, to an extent hitherto little understood. Some 7,328 new residential basements underneath existing houses had been granted planning permission up to late-2019. The majority, although often hugely costly to construct, are on a modest scale. However, over 1,500 of them are of a size and an architectural and engineering complexity that their locations might best be thought of as marking out a distinct urban geography of plutocratic London: a “basement belt” where, almost literally, the super-rich have been pouring huge amounts of money into the ground. The calculations are complex, but the volume of soil excavated by the wealthy in London in order to create their luxurious bunkers since 2008 – equivalent, perhaps, to a space that could be occupied by 12 St Paul’s Cathedrals – might be thought of as having a broad equivalence to the capacity of the new apartments built in the “luxified skies” over the same period. The movement of earth and the costs of construction have been considerable in both instances. The politics of elite verticality now moves both up and down.

To find out more, take a look at the video essay published by Vox Media a few days ago or the research paper it is based on.

The Super-Rich through the Lens of Economic Criticism
Ellen Grünkemeier (Bielefeld), Nora Pleßke (Magdeburg), Joanna Rostek (Gießen), Natalie Roxburgh (Hamburg)

#IchBinHanna: The Economics of Research and Teaching in Academia
Open discussion

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Brief Closing Remarks and Announcements
Oliver v. Knebel Doeberitz, Jonatan Jalle Steller (Organisers)