NPR. You know, many of us did a lot of binge watching during the thick of the pandemic.

That includes economists like Mark Taylor, who's a professor at Washington University in

St. Louis.

I think I was watching downtown Abbey.

So that's the classic British drama set during the early 1900s.

And Mark recalls this one scene between the Earl of Grantham and his American wife.

They're talking about their daughter.

Do you think she would have been happy with a fortune hunter?

It might have been. I was. It was a little rebuke pointing out that her fortune had actually saved Downtown Abbey from

from ruin a couple of decades early when she married into the family.

The family in Downton Abbey is fictional, but for a few decades beginning in the late 1800s,

around 100 real life American women did marry British aristocrats. These brides became

known as Dollar Princesses and their marriages were matches made an economic

heaven. This is the indicator from Planet Money, I'm Whelan Wong.

And I'm Darren Woods. It is Love Week on The Indicator, our series about the economics of love and

romance.

Today on the show we explain how rich American women ended up in the British aristocracy during the Gilded Age.

It is a transatlantic historical saga that involves plummeting crop prices, crumbling mansions, calls for economic protectionism,

and a baby exclusive club.

It's this small group of men with titles, you know, your barons and your viscounts.

And in the late 1800s, they were firmly established as the largest landowners in Britain.

They owned estates spanning tens of thousands of acres.

...