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Is there any theory for why sophisticated European societies all developed alongside opulently wealthy families? It seems counterintuitive as you’d expect the society that opted for less “vanity waste” would dominate any with a family that owned huge estates and castles etc. is there some reason for why, in history, the countries with opulent royal families performed better? Does “place enormous abundant wealth into this one avaricious family” counterintuitively promote something that helps the whole society?
Orson Welles knows
This the small scale question thread, so I'll just give an outline of my favored theory: it is all downstream of dominant military technologies necessary for the state to survive and the cost to produce those technologies economically.
Chariot warfare depended on "heroes" who could afford chariots, time to train in the immense skill required to fight with sword and bow, and multiple horses and slaves to care for it all. It gave us the heroic eras, the Mahabharata and the Iliad and the Achaemenid empire, which had dominant and tiny nobilities (relatively speaking of course). The Greeks developed the phalanx, which privileged having large numbers of disciplined and physically fit but not necessarily all that individually skilled troops, but requires a relatively large middle class of free landowners who can afford the equipment of a hoplite and the physical fitness necessary to fight, this lead us to the Polis and democracy in various forms, and then to the Roman development of the related maniple system, which leads to the Marian reforms and the "great generals" period of the fall of the Roman Republic, then to the imperial period when keeping a large standing army in the field with no conquests required certain taxation policies, eventually to the great estates becoming as autarkic as possible to avoid taxes, then to feudalism. Feudalism relied on the plate armored knight, who as military units are big and require a lot of training and skill and equipment. They can only be produced by a system that takes a great deal of surplus from small serfs and gives it to knightly families. Gunpowder, and the sudden renewed usefulness of mass peasant armies trained in a few weeks, delivers democracy, nationalism, communism, and ideological warfare more generally.
So when we talk about developed European countries having grand families, it is mostly downstream of the feudal military model of the knight drawing wealth for his plate armor and horses from the peasantry, because no one in continental Europe could organize a peasant army that could stop a knightly charge outside that one time that got really famous; the rest is just the leveling function of the firearm slowly grinding down that advantage over the centuries.
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I would naively expect the correlation to run the other way; only a society as wealthy as France can build Versailles.
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