Usually, they are landlords. They own big swaths of land, and have tenants (including tenant farmers) who pay them rent. They may also have other forms of wealth that generate income, like stocks or bond, but until the 20th century, most wealth was held in the form of land. Novels by Anthony Trollope tend to be more explicit than most from that era about the exact nature of characters’ wealth.
Such people were nobility and gentry (the difference between the two usually being that gentry didn’t have noble titles). Most land in Europe (and also Asia, come to think of it) was owned by nobility and gentry and tenant farmers would pay them to live on and farm that land. It was considered a point of pride that they didn’t have to hold any other type of employment and that was what marked them as part of the upper class.
Depending on the place, the nobility and gentry made up somewhere between 1-10% of the population, but 80-90% of land was owned by them. There’s an excellent, though long, history book, *The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy* that talks about land ownership, rents, and more, in addition to how it was that their political power and wealth began to seriously decline from the 1870s onward.
Everyone is talking about land and crops in Europe which is true, but let’s not forget the colonies.
A lot of the nobility of Europe owned farms and land in the Americas (Haiti for instance) and worked 100s of thousands of African slaves to death growing sugar, cotton, indigo and other crops.
It was a huge source of cheap goods for Europe and wealth for the aristocracy.
Largely, the same way it works for rich people now. Things like income from investments, full or shared ownership of business ventures (things like railroads or shipping) and real estate holdings. Many rich people back then, especially nobility and aristocrats (in countries which have nobility) owned massive estates of land, and got tremendous amount of income from that land from things like farming, timber, mining, and renting it out to tenants.
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