Spending : the Hunts, silver, and dynastic families in America

Abstract

This paper places in a broader perspective a recent dramatic attempt by privately organized wealth and power to dominate the most fundamental institution of modern capitalist society—the market. This perspective derives from my initial, first-hand work with familiesof old wealth in Galveston, Texas, a once thriving port on the Gulf of Mexico, and later with certain families in Houston, which eventually overshadowed Galveston as the regional metropolis. Because of the similarity in historic conditions nation-wide by which certain fortunes, accumulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became dynastic organizations, I came to view my Galveston subjects on a broader canvas. Over the past century, the generally uniform and rationalized ways of preserving dynastic wealth have had a basic shaping function for such family-fortune organizations, making them an appropriate subject matter for comparative study.