Like many gentlemen of his time, Darwin married his first cousin. In fact, marriages between close relatives were commonplace in 19th-century England, and Kuper argues that they played a crucial role in the rise of the bourgeoisie. This study brings out the connection between private lives, public fortunes, and the history of imperial Britain.

Marriages between close relatives were commonplace in nineteenth-century England. This title shows us just how the political networks of the eighteenth-century aristocracy were succeeded by hundreds of in-married bourgeois clans - in finance and industry, in local and national politics, in the church, and in intellectual life.