Dynasties

Family firms can combine enormous wealth and influence with peculiar personal habits and fierce quarrels between relatives. Even so, few writers have looked carefully at what keeps these businesses going from one generation to the next.

In this book, the award-winning economic historian David S. Landes, known for The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, examines some of the most powerful family enterprises in Europe, Japan and the United States. The families he covers include the Rothschilds, Morgans, Fords, Toyodas, Agnellis, Rockefellers and Guggenheims.

Alongside these family companies, Landes traces the lives of the people who founded and shaped them, and the inheritance each left behind. For some, that inheritance proved a blessing; for others, it did not.