Noel Annan reviews David Cannadine's The Decline and Fall of British Aristocracy and notes that in 1870, 7,500 families owned 4/5 of the land in the British Isles. (56% of England and 93% of Scotland).
“And yet, the classes have certainly changed their shape in Britain. The aristrocracy has diversified their range of jobs. Cannadine has identified a movie producer, an auctioneer, a professor of ceramics, a landscape gardener, a bookbinder, and a mining engineer. Some have slid down the social scale. They number a bus conductor, a police constable, an assistant in a deli, and the director of a chain of sex shops.”
– Noel Annan, “The Death of Society” in The New York Review of Books, Dec. 6, 1990. (Noted Dec. 9, 1990).
Interestingly, I just finished reading a review of Cannadine's latest book, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire in the Nov. 7, 2002 issue of the New York Review. Ornamentalism — intentionally titled just so to draw a comparison to the late Edward Said's Orientalism — makes the case that the British ran that great empire not so much on a racist dynamic as a class dynamic.
Cannadine . . . deals with the race question without prejudice and without misconceptions. [He] concludes that racial considerations were not the predominant force in the ordering of the Empire. Too many people looked for affinities among the hierarchies of native societies. Too many were like Lady Gordon, welcoming the Fijian chiefs as men of equivalent rank while looking down on her nanny and the other whites of inferior class.
-David Gilmour, “Nobs and Nabobs” in the New York Review of Books, Nov. 7, 2002