Dinkel on Transnational Inheritances from the US

Also new online from Law and History Review: “The Rich Uncle from America”: Transnational Inheritance Transfers between the United States, Germany, and Russia, 1840s–1980s, by Jürgen Norbert Dinkel, University of Leipzig:

This article examines cross-border inheritance transfers between the United States, Germany, and Russia between the 1840s and the late 1980s. These transfers were not only characterized by private considerations and kinship networks but were also strongly intertwined with national and international political developments. This article argues that the history of transnational inheritance transfers since the 19th century can be subdivided into three distinct periods. The first period, from the mid-19th century to 1914, witnessed the gradual development and expansion of professional networks and legal agreements designed to facilitate cross-border estate transfers. By contrast, the second period, from World War I and the October Revolution of 1917 through the late 1960s, was a time of unprecedented global disruption. Unlike the half-century before World War I, governments and probate courts complicated, delayed, and prevented inheritance transfers across state borders due to military and ideological conflicts. During the third period, beginning in the 1960s, governments, international organizations, lawyers, and families resumed efforts to create structures that would legally protect and enable cross-border estate transfers in an increasingly globalized world.

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Inheritance Practices in the 20th century

[We have the following announcement. The deadline is Feb.28, 2017.]

Inheritance Practices in the 20th Century: A Workshop at the German Historical Institute Washington, DC.

Tentative dates: 9/14/2017 – 9/16/2017

Conveners: Jürgen Dinkel (University of Gießen), Simone Lässig (GHI Washington), Vanessa Ogle (University of Pennsylvania)

American baby boomers stand to inherit about $11.6 trillion in the coming years. The distribution of this wealth will be highly unequal, however. Households in the wealthiest decile will receive by far the biggest inheritances, an estimated $1.5 million per heir on average. By contrast, heirs in the poorest decile will receive an average of $27,000. Enormous and unequal intergenerational wealth transfers are expected in other regions of the world as well.

Despite the substantial contribution of inheritance practices to social inequality in societies and individual families, we know very little about the distribution of inherited money and assets in the period since the late nineteenth century. Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century has spurred heightened interest in the question of inherited wealth and its relation to rising inequality over the course of the past century.

Although historians have published extensively on inheritance law and practices in earlier periods in a variety of world regions and among different social groups, the twentieth century remains largely unexplored. This workshop thus seeks to bring together the history of inheritance and contemporary history. We want to examine and compare how property and property rights were distributed upon death in different world regions, urban settings, and social groups from the late nineteenth century to the present. We want to analyze how wealth transfers influenced family and kinship in terms of individual life plans, intra-family relations (including sibling and gender dynamics), intergenerational relations, questions of race, social inequality, notions of risk and entrepreneurship, and mobility (including transnational migration). While the legal frameworks for inheritance are important and will be considered in connection with the questions the workshop address, we are primarily interested in inheritance practices. Specifically, we seek to analyze what strategies (wills, trusts, inheritance agreements, etc.) testators used to distribute which parts of their property to which heirs and what factors determined their choice of heirs and the apportionment of property and assets among them. We are also interested in increasingly common strategies used to minimize different taxes on inheritances, such as the use of tax havens and low-tax jurisdictions for setting up trusts and the like. Additional questions include: What significance did kinship possess vis-à-vis personal relationships with persons who were not kin to the testator? What conditions were placed on inheritances and what role did inheritance play in the lives of the heirs?

By examining inheritance practices, the workshop aims to provide new insights into the structure and meaning of personal networks (like family and kinship relations) in the twentieth century. The workshop’s focus on inherited property is also intended to shed new light on continuities and discontinuities in social inequality in families and in societies. Finally, the workshop will explore the interdependence between public, social, and economic welfare structures, on the one hand, and private family and kinship networks, on the other hand, in the modern age.