The article doesn't also quite give the numbers to say how effective they actually were. By modern standards the amount of people actually governing the empire was tiny. For instance the colonial office (the bit in London that administered the colonies centrally) had 14 staff in 1816, and grew to about 25 by 1850 [1]. The total colonial service including most overseas posts (except India and a few others) was about 1000 people by 1900, the Indian civil service was never more than ~1200. This over an empire of ~450 million subjects.
By contrast today's Civil service is about 550,000 governing a population of 69 million [3]. Of course it must be pointed out that todays government does more things for better or worse, so it's not saying they did the same with a few orders of magnitude fewer people. But still, seems pretty effective to me.
[1]: Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815–1830: "At the Colonial Office in 1816, there was a tiny establishment of 14: the Secretary of State, Earl Bathurst, his Under Secretary, Henry Goulburn, MP, the Permanent Secretary, a librarian, a translator and nine clerks. According to Goulburn, 'several' of the clerks were employed on slavery-law enforcement duties all the time. The enforcement of the antislavery law seems to have had priority over any other policy objective."
For instance the colonial office (the bit in London that administered the colonies centrally) had 14 staff in 1816, and grew to about 25 by 1850
Important context:
1. The Colonial Service never administered India, the biggest colony.
2. Lot of these colonies had representative institutions of their own. "We have 43 colonies, and not 50, 60, or 70, as has been variously stated; 27 of these have representative institutions, some in a higher degree of perfection than others, no doubt, but the whole have representative institutions, including Canada, New Brunswick, Jamaica, Antigua, Barbadoes, and all the minor West Indian colonies." [0]
> 1. The Colonial Service never administered India, the biggest colony.
And by that point the East India Company had one of the largest armies on earth.
It wasn’t that their administration was effective, it just didn’t care what happened as long as the plunder rolled in. It was backed by the largest Navy in the world and largest private army, which allowed it to devolve most functions to local puppets which implemented them brutally (and why the EIC was eventually nationalized). For example the Mughal bureaucracy alone was massive and they just coopted it, as long as they had the means to physically enforce their control.
It doesn't take that many people to perform rent extraction -- you can have an entire country run by one absentee landlord so long as you can pay the local police to maintain order for you. Obviously the counterfactual is not available to us, but the colonial administration presided over the deaths of tens of millions due to disease and famine. Some of that is unavoidable tragedy, but quite a lot of it is direct mismanagement (especially fervent devotion to a "work sets you free" mindset and free market capitalism).
We are indeed not counting the people doing the work. The colonial office does not include the actual administration of the country, that is kind of the whole point of my comment.
I am in the process of reading the volume on India for the Oxford History of the British Empire.
In early modern academia, "Historia" was defined as opposed to "Philosophia" as being the study of the particular versus that of generalizations.
One thing that my experience in studying history at a major European university showed me is that almost any generalization one makes about any period in history can be disproved. There is a lot of complexity in the development of path dependent evolution and irreversible processes that simply cannot be compressed and modeled.
That's comparable to the Victorian elites' situation, where they only count people directly employed by the home office, and ignore the so called independent colonial administration as if it's a completely different category of human.
Are they not also Victorian Elites, or did they lose that status by not being in Britain?
Above we are counting them. This about ~10000 people total, most of them abroad. We are not counting military since these are civil servants, but neither are we counting military today.
I feel like not counting the military is silly in that case, because the military in colonies was essentially involved in police actions, engineering duties, and ensuring administrative rules were followed.
As an essential part of the colony, you can't really count them out. That's similar to how in feudal structures, and military regimes, I'd count the military and civil service as one entity.
>Some of that is unavoidable tragedy, but quite a lot of it is direct mismanagement (especially fervent devotion to a "work sets you free" mindset and free market capitalism).
It was all going so well until you spewed propaganda, believe it not the provinces administered by the British were least affected by disease and famine primarily because of the infrastructure and institutions that'd been established in them.
Additionally, we have a better insight into those regions because of the record keeping again introduced by the bureaucracy forced upon them...
You just have to look at past colonies today in india to still see the positive impact they had. To this very day all proper and impressive buildings are the ones build back then, sadly they are all slowly falling apart because of lack of care and maintenance by the locals.
The size of any given bureaucracy has little to do with the work load as demonstrated by Parkinson in the 1950s.
Ruling in the 1800s when firearms were orders of magnitude more expensive than today was an entirely different game than doing so in a world of mass consumption.
Divide and conquer in a world where the pony express is the fastest channel and telegraphs were the almost exclusive to the banking system and selected government agencies was still possible. Now high school students can coordinate nationally via social media. Look at the consequences of Arab spring 2011 still reverberating.
In a way, Victorian elites were much more effective relative the the helplessness of civil society at a time when people would be counted as highly mobile if they had a bicycle and could routinely travel to a few more villages than their grand parents had ever seen in their lifetimes.
The Victorian era, 1837-1901 roughly overlapped the rail era - first railway 1804 in Cornwall, "railway mania" 1840s which was a railway stock bubble and crash.
>The mania reached its zenith in 1846, when 263 Acts of Parliament for setting up new railway companies were passed, with the proposed routes totalling 9,500 miles (15,300 km). About a third of the railways authorised were never built...
Somewhat reminiscent of our current AI boom. At least the Victorian one seemed to lead on to prosperity so fingers crossed.
I'm not that up on the details but a lot of the former British empire like the US, Canada, Australia etc. are doing quite well. I was in Hong Kong in the 1980s and it did much better then under UK government than the mainland. Not sure about places like India. Ireland wasn't that great.
It’s complicated, because while yes the British were bastards, unlike some of the powers they weren’t completely rapacious, and recognized that at least a modicum of self sufficiency and good governance was necessary for them to have something to steal long term.
The French, Spanish, or (big yikes) Belgian colonies have had significantly harder times.
Kind of a ‘what did the Roman’s ever do for us?’ situation.
I get the impression a lot of the success was just providing some sort of rule of law and military security and then letting markets do their thing along the lines of Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market. (Scot who did some study at Oxford and died in 1790).
The old British Empire was hardly a an exemplar of free market economics. There were many independent companies but there were also chartered monopolies and price controls. We take basic economics for granted today but back then many leaders literally didn't understand the basics of how it worked.
Seems like an accurate picture of the Victorian elite, but it sounds like they were optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked. That was success "on their own terms," as the article puts it, but not something to emulate.
The upper middle class (i.e. professional class - I know other countries define these things differently) that provided the administrators were just good at their jobs and worked hard. Leonard Woolf's autobiography is a great insider view. Histories of the period too.
I think we are entering a wierd era where a huge population (baby boomers) are returing with incredible passive wealth compared to any other working class era in history.
This is... a mass elite or more of one that may have ever existed before including the small merchant class of the late 1800s
And though some are quite wealthy, the average Boomer net worth of about $1.6MM is concentrated in the wealthy top few, like any other demographic. The median Boomer has a net worth of $300-$400K, the largest fraction of which is probably their house (so not income-producing), and that isn't really a lot to live off of in 2026.
While the house isn't producing, it is expense reducing, and that works out to be the same thing. Assuming that the house is paid for, of course, if your net worth is really only $300K, odds are you don't have the house paid for either: social Security is the bulk of your income, which, it's enough to live on, but it isn't a life of luxury.
The insight comes when you consider each and what they mean. That is imagine two people with a net worth of $300k.
Person A has a paid off house. If their net worth is 300k that implies a low cost of living area, and a small house. They likely are used to living a modest life (most people when given more money will spend it on a better house). They won't need much money, and better yet, since their house is paid for, they don't have to pay rent with their income. Of course it is entirely possible they are "party animals" who never are home and only need a tiny house for an address, and they spent every penny they earn on alcohol for their 'friends' - but this seems unlikely.
Person B doesn't have their house paid off (living in an apartment counts!), and their net worth is 300k. The question then becomes how much are they paying for housing every month, since this reduces their spending ability.
Neither person will have a great life (assuming they live in the US - 300k net worth in a poor country is considerable wealth), but a paid off house allows for a nice life, while paying for the house means scrapping by.
Thank you blu. Would you go so far as to say that the current system is designed to discourage the existence of a Person A (or at least the non-party animal Person A) since they are not consuming as much?
No. There is not "the system" as a single unique identity. Different parts have different motivations. Some parts do discourage A, but other parts encourage it. Most don't care. Same with B - they are different parts, but they get all sides.
Moderns who are accustomed to typical homeownership arrangements do not even realize how different this world is from feudal times and manor houses in the UK. If we transplanted a medieval feudal lord or serf to 2026, they would be appalled and shocked at how wasteful our land-use is.
I have contemplated this, especially in terms of universal suffrage, where we've progressed from a male landowner with voting rights, to anyone over 18. And I've also come to find out that there are many, many homeowners today who flout zoning, insurance, and business licensing to run "cottage industries" in SFH-zoned areas, and these are often sources of clash with the HOA.
It's been mentioned on HN before how the "front lawn" and ornamental gardens are implicitly conspicuous consumption. They boast, "I own land and I can waste all this space on non-farmland! I am wealthy enough to feed my family without growing my own!" Because in feudal days, in the manor house, your estate and your land were really expected to produce revenue! The lord of a manor was duty-bound to hire a cadre of servants to care for the home and family, and hire or sublet to farmers and shepherds and others who would exploit the land. The estates, the convents and monasteries, the farmlands, the Southern plantations, these were all implicitly revenue-producing, not merely where someone lived, and then rode a horse to their office somewhere else in a different "zone". That would've been absurdly wasteful...
So today, there are people secretly painting sneakers, or selling firearms, or running a family farm to sell raw milk and mutton, or doing mani-pedis, or selling tee shirts, from their residential-zoned McMansions or even apartments. But typically a SFH, where in 2026, we've decided that if we're investing a cool million in property, it would indeed be wasteful not to exploit that, even if we need to do it on the D.L., and fight endlessly with the HOA and code inspectors, who are gonna say we need to rent office space.
The obvious difference between then and now is intensive agriculture. In modern times, we don't need as much farmland per capita. I hate seeing productive farmland developed into mcmansions as much as anyone. But, the market values the mcmansions more.
Latifundia would have been a known concept to the historic peoples mentioned by GP and the ones GP is talking about purposefully rejected the practice. Local, small agriculture was a key aspect of culture and political power, insofar as the power to feed is the power to deny food.
In some countries, imputed rent used to be taxable income. If you owned your home, you basically calculated the market rent for a similar home, subtracted your expenses, and paid taxes for the rest. It was one of those policies economists considered justified (because it made the choice between owning and renting tax neutral) but the general public didn't.
Those times are gone, but the theoretical justification that makes homes income-producting assets remains.
Sounds sensible. In my country (and probably many others), if you and your neighbour own identical houses or apartments and have identical mortgages, and instead of living in your own one you rent the neighbours one and live in that and vice versa, then you can both offset your mortgage interest against the rental income and both be better off than if you lived in your own house.
I accept the premise on the math, but "better off" is subjective. I'm in the UK so that's my context.
When your renter informs you of the boiler breaking, or a roof needs replacing, that's going to get thorny - "It was fine when I was using it/living in it, did you break it?"
Perhaps the latest round of updates to property law for renters come along and suddenly as a landlord you have to above and beyond what you need to as an owner; you both have to do X, Y or Z to your properties because they're rental and not a basic owner situation.
If you’ve got a paid-off house, some savings, social security or a pension, and only another 10-20 years to live then you’re far better off than many Americans.
That page has a telephone hotline that people can call to get advice, including help to find a reliable broker. Probably the biggest problem with (honest) reverse mortgages is that they can run out of money before you die. You can continue to stay in your house, but you probably immediately fall into extreme poverty.
Roughly 1/3 of Boomers also have private pensions (remember those from before the 2000s?). Social Security is about 25K USD per year. It is expected to only cover 40% of living costs. It is scary how many retired Americans live only from Social Security in their retirement.
You do, but even if it's paid for, you still have to pay taxes, insurance, and maintenance on it. It's likely better than renting in most cases, but it's not a free place to live.
It's still an income-producing asset. It produces quite a lot of income. You have to pay for maintenance on everything, but that doesn't mean that income-producing assets don't exist.
This is the most European thing I’ve read all week. Income is inflow of money, while rent is an expense. The avoidance of expense should not be considered income for tax purposes: it would discourage frugality.
No, that's just a measurement methodology. It's income because it's a valuable product that you receive.
Consider a farm that grows wheat on 15 acres of fields. Are those fields an income-producing asset? If so, your house is also an income-producing asset.
Very true. And the way things are going, just in the English-speaking countries, United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, those between 18 and 40 are having more trouble buying that house or condo.
Those luxury apartments are going up everywhere, at least in the United States.
$2200 a month with amenities for a one bedroom studio.
Because boomers were imbued with love for centralized solutions by their greatest generation parents without really understand the "this isn't a magic wand" side of the coin. And so they went on and regulated the living crap out of where and what kind of housing (everything really) can be built so the only way to make a project still have a "someone will finance this" profit margin after all the getting kicked in the dick by regulatory hoops you gotta do is to build a lot of units hence the proliferation of luxury condos and tract home/townhouse developments.
The baby boom happened in some countries at different times. In the US from 1946 till 1965, in Germany 1955-1969. In Japan fertility dropped after 1973
On other social media platforms, the boomers are aged 28 to 107. And I'm not exaggerating, you can check for yourself. The muddying of definitions is the root of all evil.
The age range of baby boomers is not seriously in question no matter what some internet random on social may say. At most it's a little fuzzy around the edges, but Wikipedia's range of 1946 and 1964 seems on the mark.
Rent seeking how? As the article says, most government positions were unpaid and to be an MP required paying all your own election expenses out of pocket, which were huge. They did it for the prestige and social rewards, not financial. Landowners were expected to take on government roles, also for free.
I know! How could these literal landlords be rent-seeking by taking unpaid positions of political influence to increase literal rental income and protect their wealth?
Until the 1830s the British elections at least were openly corrupt, the system of 'Rotten Boroughs' meant the makeup of Parliament was still essentially mediaeval into the early industrial era. You had absolutely mad situations where Manchester sent nobody to Parliament, but an old village which had literally fallen into the sea long before still sent two MPs.
Its rent seeking because they’re using the government role to bring in the dough for themselves after they get the role. It just takes a bit of money upfront similar to a landlord buying a house.
That’s also how you restrict government roles to the rich who only use it for personal gain. Similar to people who believe that Trump is generously by “donating” his salary back but not realizing that he and his family are earning far more in bribes and kickbacks using his position.
You're asserting a lot of things that aren't in the article. If you want to argue Victorian-era MPs were all motivated by corruption then go ahead but you'll need to cite strong evidence for that, because the general consensus was that MPs of that time were not particularly corrupt. As the article says, they didn't even spend much time on lawmaking at all, so there wasn't a lot of legislation to abuse.
It's not asserting corruption. they were the voluntary caretakers of a system designed to ensure their prosperity and they provided their time and energy so that the system would continue to do so.
The system was already set-up to their maximum benefit. Their corruption was in making sure nothing changed, no matter the clamoring of the vast majority.
The problem is the counter-examples. We have dysfunctional cleptocracies worldwide. They go nowhere. Last of all, they do not conquer- and transfer there money outside towards high-trust societies. Thus by the empire they conquered- they can not have been as corrupt as the others. If the machine you build kills it- you can not have eaten that machine faster than it produces pocket butter.
"The Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent."
-- Karl Marx
> Landowners were expected to take on government roles, also for free
This was just the dying embers of feudalism. Which is still theoretically present in England, having been abolished in Scotland in the year 2000.
Careful, that's some of that stuff that they teach in humanities and classics courses. You know, what is being labeled as wasteful or impractical in this thread.
I believe Victorian wealth disparity was on par with today's in America -- perhaps America has slightly more "power law" wealth at the very top of the percentage charts -- but for those in charge of new empires, maybe this article will be very useful and remind them it's better to go party in SF than it is to put in too much time in the office.
I'm not sure that demonstrates anything. That just demonstrates that people work different jobs than they did back then; it doesn't tell us anything about wealth distribution.
21% of US jobs are service occupations. All you've really done is establish that cars exist so the wealthy have deemed it no longer necessary to allow filthy peasants to live in their mansions.
“I never thought I would be so rich as to be able to own a car, but I did become rich — so rich that in the end I could give up working if I liked. That was a great surprise to me.
But at the same time, it was the irony of life that while I could afford a car, I could not afford a maid."
This seems far to low. First, I assume you are talking about the current economy. If yes, various sources tell me it is more like 80%.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says:
> Service-Providing Industries: Account for roughly 80% to 81% of total U.S. employment, covering fields such as healthcare, education, retail, hospitality, finance, and professional/business services.
The BLS has two "service" definitions. The 80% figure includes almost literally everything that isn't producing physical goods, including doctors, lawyers, professors, and software developers. The 21% figure is the BLS's "service occupations" subgrouping that you would consider more traditional service work - preparing and serving food and drink, cleaning, hired guards, etc.
> the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed
the word "powerful" isn't really a great choice, because no empire has had the reach of ability as the USA. The USA also used soft power much more effectively, even if the UK reigned over more people.
Per capita largest, maybe? At one point, 1/4 in people in the world were UK subjects.
But I can get a cleaner twice a week, grab an Uber whenever I want to drive me wherever I want, have professional chefs cook for me every evening via food delivery services, etc etc
That's an unusual measure -- and I like it. I wonder what those percentages are in very wealthy communities in America, e.g. Greenwich and surroundings, Nantucket, Hamptons plus labor communities west.
what a strange rebuttal to the observably true fact that wealth disparity today is very similar to victorian and french revolution times, as the parent was saying.
Regarding French Revolution times, I found a good source to confirm your assertion: "Is Wealth Inequality Today as Bad as in Pre-Revolutionary France?"[1] That blog post uses various peer-reviewed academic sources from researchers that calculated pre-industrial (historical) Gini coefficient for different nations.
From that same blog post, they mentioned an excellent data source: "The World Inequality Database". Check this link[2] to compare historical "Top 1% net personal wealth share" for USA vs France vs UK. Hint: After the page loads, you need to drag the green slider at the bottom of the chart to the far left. Then you can see back to 1800. It is wild how unequal Victorian Britan was compared to anything today: Top 1% owned 68% of wealth!
>but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.
Interesting to see this popular myth still being regurgitated when someone as perceptive as Bertrand Russell who lived through part of it admitted it was self-aggrandizing propaganda. In truth 80% of the British "Empire" were impoverished Indians. While back at home the Blue Books were churning out shocking reports of the misery and physical state of the British working class compared to their American and European peers. Read the archives from the early 20th century for a real eye-opener. And to top it all off, the "rule the waves" trope when Britain lost the Battle of the Chesapeake, aka the one naval battle that truly mattered in its history.
I wouldn't say the UK is now, but was the most powerful empire to have existed. What else would you call a nation that 65 nations have claimed independence from? They can't claim independence if they weren't once part of the empire.
At the risk of repeating myself, those 65 nations were comprised of 80% impoverished Indians who struggled with decades of recurring famines. Power was being defined on the European continent through much of the 19th century and 20th century. See the intro to "The Grand Chessboard" where the author expounds on the idea that only Napoleonic France and the US came close to world hegemony, as well as my other replies in this thread.
> And to top it all off, the "rule the waves" trope when Britain lost the Battle of the Chesapeake, aka the one naval battle that truly mattered in its history.
With all due respect, this is Americentric nonsense. If you had to rank the most important British naval battles obviously Trafalgar is at the top. The Nile, Jutland, and even arguably the Armada campaign are also much more important.
A British loss at Trafalgar would not have prevented the Prussians from tipping the scale in favor of the anti-Napoleonic coalition at Waterloo ten years later. And for good reason: continental Europe was the center of world power, the main chessboard where it was measured and exercised, not overseas backwater where naval blockades could only go so far. And I'm only paraphrasing Brzezinski's famous book here.
I wonder whether you are wrong for the same reason that the people are wrong who say the main chessboard in WWII was the area between the Rhine and the Volga. It ignores the high toll imposed on Germany by its being extremely restricted for most of the war in its ability to ship anything (and to receive shipments initiated by non-German entrepreneurs) while the allies were much less restricted so that for example the Soviets fighting on this "main chessboard" had supplies flowing in from Murmansk, Vladivostok and the Persian Corridor through Iran. IIRC the value of these supplies in 2026 dollars is about a trillion dollars (largely paid for by London and Washington).
Sorry but this reply is too oblique for me to provide a constructive rebuttal. Fact of the matter is, Russia was the beginning of the end for Napoleon whose fate was sealed through a series of timeline-altering strategic blunders that more ample supply chains would not have remedied.
In which European countries were wages higher than in Britain? In which countries were the living conditions so much higher than in Britain in that period? That Britain ruled India and India was poor is no secret but that also doesn’t mean they weren’t powerful.
Also regarding Chesapeake, Britain’s century of hegemony came afterwards. Trafalgar came afterwards, and mattered a lot. Losing that battle doesn’t mean the navy wasn’t globally dominant in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
What’s the Bertrand Russell quote?
You can list a long series of reasons why they were weak and crap, ackshually. But presumably plenty about them was also not weak and crap otherwise they wouldn’t have ended up the global hegemon for a century. Certainly in terms of global trade dominance, at their peak nobody in history has come close, not China and not the USA.
Another popular misuse of the term hegemony that's in line with the retrospective aggrandizement I mentioned earlier. It suits the monolithic power held by some ancient Greek city-states over their neighbors (whether economic, military or cultural), but not the power and influence Britain had to share with France through much of the the 19th century in the colonial world.
You can find evidence for this flawed retrospection in the modern and recurring (mis)characterizations of former British influence. For example, the alleged dominance of the British Pound among central banks (when in reality most international transactions were still settled in bullions, while half the world was effectively using the French-based LMU); its predominant role in abolishing slavery through prosecution of slave-ships (which hardly affected the US and was only accomplished with the willing participation of the French Republic); its central role in the dissemination of cultural and scientific publications (despite surveys showing that in 1870 French was by far the dominant language for global publications in agriculture, applied sciences, commerce, industry and technology). Remember that it was post-WW1 America that helped English replace French as the lingua franca, not the UK. There's a reason Disraeli was still speaking in French with Russian diplomats in 1877. That's not what a "world hegemon" does, and using such exaggerations does a serious disservice to history.
From memory, it was something about the English belief that their naval supremacy was like "a law of nature", only to have it shattered in one day by a country with little naval history (Germany). Together with the equally short-lived delusion that "the whole world would become exactly like England".
And I don't know why you chose such a misleading metric as wages rather than actual living standards of the British working class as late as 1919. From McClure's Magazine:
>Every European visitor who has traveled through the United States has commented upon the stature of men and women in our factory towns as opposed to the factory classes in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds. The Blue Book Reports of the British Parliament have stressed the number of British working men with dwarfed physique. Investigation shows an abnormal number of young men whose optic nerve was so imperfect they could not see the sights of a rifle; whose auditory nerve was weak; whose vital force was not sufficient to develop enamel upon the teeth; whose heart action was feeble and whose respiration was sub-normal. British students find the explanation in dark tenements, insufficient food, want of playgrounds where boys and girls could excercise and build their bodies, in child labor, in pregnant women who worked up to within a month of their confinement.
Yes, the bad teeth stereotype might be a living residual of these severe deficiencies (you can still see it in many parts of post-USSR Eastern Europe as well). And before you claim it was any better in the 19th century, know that there's an entire scholarly field devoted to the miseries of the Victorian proletariat.
The truth is, Britain simply did not have the wealth to accommodate its population tripling in size in the span of a few decades. You can still get a sense of this struggling working class feel today by walking through just about any English town and looking at its endless rows of compact, gloomy-looking houses and people.
> physical state of the British working class compared to their American and European peers
Probably not European, British workers were very well paid by continental standards (cost of living was higher though). If you want an example of pure exploitative capitalism where workers were reduced to near serfdom there is Belgium.
>British workers were very well paid by continental standards
See my reply to jjtwixman above which rebukes this misleading metric. In fact, the cited account is particularly telling in that it is made in comparison to continental standards.
That appears anecdotal? Real wages for unskilled urban workers around 1900 in Britain were higher than in pretty much any other European country. An average worker in England worked less hours and made more money than their equivalent in France and Germany. Only Denmark, Sweden and Ireland were somewhat close.
These British Blue Books reports were based on country-wide surveys conducted for the Parliament and as such were anything but anectodal. I specifically quoted an American magazine to emphasize how visible this misery was even to a foreign observer. In the case at hand, they surveyed some of the most populated English factory towns which your "average worker" would have called home. Not the "slums of Victorian cities", to quote historian Sheridan Wayne Gilley, where life was even harder for the "half-heathen multitudes of the Victorian urban poor". Just those average workers which had been "herded into factories and workshops, subjected to industrial regulation, and denied the fullest political freedoms". You get the picture.
Well… I’m not arguing that the conditions weren’t terrible just that they were better than in most continental countries. US of course was on another level (yet there was plenty of squalor there as well)
See my reply to BoxOfRain above. The grand chessboard was continental Europe. Britain and its sub 10 million people was a naval nuisance that would not have fundamentally altered Napoleon's self-sabotage on the continent. He called it a "nation of shopkeepers" for a reason.
Chesapeake, on the other hand, sealed the birth of a world-changing nation.
Ultimatly, the new-comer empires got the old warhorse in such a fight, it had to give up the empire- and the us wisely kept out of that classic extractive empire buisness, supporting free trade to placate all those sandwiched late-comer nation as empires going hyperactive.
So in a way, germany got its wish- the french and british empire where no more after 2 world wars.
Germany didn’t want to destroy the British and French empires. They wanted continental domination and their “place in the sun”. Germany remains central to Europe as is unavoidable but it’s not dominating the continent in the way either the Kaiserreich or the third Reich wanted.
Incidentally there was no greater period of free trade in human history than under British hegemony. Even the US has not pursued unilateral free trade.
India had a whole thing about that freedom of trade. The wheel in the flag is a symbol of not wanting to participate in that sort of free trade the british empire offered.
> they were optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked.
If you go through history, it's hard to find a king that is not like that. The only difference is that some kings (and nowadays: presidents) are better at keeping a clean public image, see The Prince by Machiavelli for details.
> optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked
I wonder if we could see the American elite the same way? Private schools, then greek houses (fraternities) on campuses. Fraternities seem like they are continuing the victorian elite education, focus on long lasting connections between them.
I don’t think that’s a helpful explanation. This period was the age of empires. Why were the Victorian elites so much more successful at it than their counterparts?
One way of thinking about it, the success of the elite (meaning the aristocracy) may be separate from the success of the empire. Most of the work behind the latter was done by the industrial bourgeoisie, engineers, workers, colonized people, etc., so the question is, how big a direct impact did the elite have on the empire? How successful they were individually is a different question.
True, but not universally, depending on whether they are involved day-to-day management or just acting as a public face to the org. Of course there's always just being in the right place at the right time. So I think it's worth looking at the specific decisions, policies, culture, etc.
I guess the author doesn't cleanly define "elite", but it does lean heavy on the upper-class, and the depiction of social life seems to suggest that as well. But I guess during that period the makeup of upper-class shifted a bit from entirely aristocrats / nobility to include others too
They had a more technologically advanced society than anyone else at the time, which enabled their empire building.
The Industrial Revolution started in England, which gave them a technological leg up on everyone else, somewhat like playing a strategy game where you get to unlock certain techs before everyone else. If you have factories producing steamships while your opponents are still building sailboats by hand, you're probably going to win a naval conflict, which you can then use to start a colony.
Is there a form of (self-)success that manifests when you accomplish what other people and only other people wanted you to accomplish? That'd be their success, not yours.
What if you fell into it by accident? I fell into it because I like computers. and the design department I worked in at the time. started an investment club.
Looking at pictures of Churchill, who was admittedly a bit after the Victorians but seems to have followed a somewhat similar lifestyle, he doesn't exactly strike me as skinny.
I imagine they did have a fair amount of obesity in the older members of the population, although it's also possible that the sportier ones (which I'm guess would have entailed things like polo and horseback riding) would remain fit into old age.
Walking everywhere. Mass obesity (there's always been a few obese people among elites everywhere!) is a product of the motorcar.
Also, food unevenly distributed across the day. Any one individual probably wouldn't have a large breakfast and elevenses and a large lunch and afternoon tea and a large dinner, on every single day. Even if you can find examples of each of those separately.
mass obesity is a product of people eating unhealthy. i have access to plenty of luxuries compared to the rest of the world, and even America, yet my BMI is about ~20. individuals are responsible for being fat.
> Caricaturing a little, we can distinguish two groups in modern educational debates: traditionalists and progressives. Traditionalists think that education should prioritize acquiring knowledge, that it should focus on ‘hard’ subjects like science, mathematics, and foreign languages, and that it should take place in a highly structured environment, where students’ time and behavior are tightly regulated. Progressives think that education should prioritize acquiring skills, that it should embrace ‘soft’ subjects beyond the supposed academic core, and that students should be given wide freedom in which to develop personally and socially.
Today's proponents of "classical education", whom I would categorize as quite conservative, sound like the supposed progressives described above, preferring to teach students how to learn.
From Dorothy L. Sayers' essay "The Lost Tools of Learning":
> What, then, are we to do? We cannot go back to the Middle Ages. That is a cry to which we have become accustomed. We cannot go back -- or can we?
> Is the Trivium [1], then, a sufficient education for life? Properly taught, I believe that it should be. At the end of the Dialectic, the children will probably seem to be far behind their coevals brought up on old-fashioned "modern" methods, so far as detailed knowledge of specific subjects is concerned. But after the
age of fourteen they should be able to overhaul the others hand over fist. Indeed, I am not at all sure that a pupil thoroughly proficient in the Trivium would not be fit to proceed immediately to the university at the age of sixteen, thus proving himself the equal of his mediæval counterpart, whose precocity often appears to us so astonishing and unaccountable.
On the last supposition: they've managed something better for themselves, which is an order where they have substantial control over public policy without being subject to the full brunt of public inquiry or responsibility. You would have to force Sam Altman to run for office; Oprah famously laughs when questioned about pursuing the presidency.
The article tries to imply this system 'worked', but Britain alreadt had an intercontinental colonial empire for 150 years prior to the Victorian era. Massive technological and scientific advances like the steam engine and calculus preceded the Victorian era. The hedonistic generation of leadership that came out of this era basically lost it all.
For better picture of what made Britain successful during this era look to folks like Isa Brunel... son of a French Revolutionary immigrant who was poor enough for debtors prison, but skilled enough in engineering and math to build some of the largest ships in the world.
Last week I worked up this one-liner: "Great Britain extracted the wealth of a vast empire, far less wealth than might have been created, pissed most of it away through bad domestic policy, and transferred the rest to the USA to pay for one-and-a-half world wars."
A failure to reinvest in domestic industrial tech; a painfully high-value currency; and low-mobility economic stratification. History does love its rhyming slams.
In the medieval era travel and communication were slow enough that being behind on technology wasn't too bad because there was time to catch up before someone conquered you. In the modern era that was no longer the case. If you've ever played a historical strategy game you know what I'm talking about.
Additionally India and China were the wealthiest regions of the pre-industrial world. There's a reason Europeans went there instead of them going to Europe. They had things Europeans wanted, rather than the other way around.
India was already conquered by the Moguls by the time the British got there, so I guess they had to consolidate their own colonisation before looking to extend.
I mean maybe you could say the industrial revolution could only have happened in Britain, but that's awfully hard to prove. It also wasn't a pre-cursor to a lot of the empire.
> India was already conquered by the Moguls by the time the British got there
Like 200 years before that. India produced a quarter of the world's manufacturing output in 1750. [1] It was already prosperous when the British got there. That's why the British were there.
You're really going to tell me that if the British hadn't conquered them, they wouldn't have rapidly adopted the industrial revolution? Why not? Japan did.
> It also wasn't a pre-cursor to a lot of the empire
I don't know what that means. Britain's navy and army, as well as its advanced capital markets, were key to conquering so much of the world. Industrial capacity is fundamental to a strong navy and army in the modern world. Advanced capital markets generally develop to support industrial growth.
China, India, and most of the Middle East had effectively been conquered by descendants of horseback quasi-nomadic peoples at the start of the British colonial era. The Qing Dynasty (Manchurians), the Mughals (descendants of Tamerlane and the Mongol aristocracy of Genghis Khan), and the Ottoman Turks (former vassals to the Mongolian Ilkhanate and also Tamerlane). It can be argued these Central Asian warlord societies were not conducive to technological development.
It wasn't universally due to lack of interest in guns (although in the Qing case, they actually did pull back on the use of firearms due to how poorly both the Ming Dynasty and Dzungar Mongols fared with the matchlock weapons of that era against strategic deployment of Qing horseback archery). India had an enormous arms manufacturing industry that included usage of rocket artillery, Timur absolutely loved using cannons, Ottoman matchlocks were considered the best in the world and even exported to China from the 1500s onward.
It wasn't the lack of arms or interest in arms, it was the lack of development of the sciences which had to flow through the patronage of those in authority. Britain had Newton and Newton co-invented calculus. The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery and higher precision manufacturing that by the Victorian Era could not be matched by Chinese or Indian workshops. The wealthy gentleman scientist and natural philosopher culture that developed the galvanic pile, the pressure cooker, astronomical telescopes, and the microscope was not something that could develop organically in these Eastern countries due to the political makeup of these empires (largely driven by descendants of nomadic warlords)
> The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery and higher precision manufacturing that by the Victorian Era could not be matched by Chinese or Indian workshops
By the Victorian Era India, at least, had substantially de-industrialized due to colonial policy.
> The wealthy gentleman scientist and natural philosopher culture that developed the galvanic pile, the pressure cooker, astronomical telescopes, and the microscope was not something that could develop organically in these Eastern countries
Why did they have to develop them organically? Europeans didn't invent gunpowder or algebra or the counting system.
I think Bill Bryson writes about this much better than I can, but in short, European political fragmentation and nascent capitalism meant that educated polymaths could offer their services to different landed aristocratic or royal patrons. Brahe and Kepler fall into those categories. So does Gauss and Euler. The creation of the Royal Society in 1660 created the venue for exploring Natural Philosophy... what ultimately became "science". It was in this atmosphere that Newton was able to publish the Principia (1687)
It's hard for us to understand this today, but science as we know it did not really exist back then in either England or anywhere else.
The invention of gunpowder in China came about from searching for an elixer of immortality. The original book on Al-Jabr was written for practical purposes in the 9th century, around the time when the foremost scholars of the Islamic Age (See Al Ghazali) would argue that ascribing the origin of the universe to a chain of cause and effect rather than the direct action of God was a form of atheism and therefore apostasy.
Europe wasn't really any better in this regards even in the 17th century. Isaac Newton himself spent the vast majority of his career working on alchemy and searching for the Philosopher Stone which he believed was harbored in the Book of Revelations.
It took decades, and the generation after Isaac Newton to begin to adopt the philosophy that many natural phenomena could be ascribed to mechanical laws (like the physics of Newton), and it's from that philosophical foundation that led to the invention of "science"
That they lost control to some guys that had to travel around entire Africa to get there shows how incompetent and backwards thinking they were. It would be impossible to conquer 100m happy and productive people with just 1000 people even if the 1000 had a bit better guns, especially since the 100m happy and productive people easily could just reproduce the new modern guns.
That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies, both in refusing to adopting the superior European technology and by continuing to oppress their own people to such a degree that their people didn't really care much about a foreign power replacing their old tyrants.
> That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies
Agree. But that's exactly my point: they were prosperous pre-colonization. The point at which this thread started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50004651 argues that these places were incapable of creating prosperity and needed Europeans to teach them. That is simply incorrect and kind of racist.
They faltered at the wrong point in history and got colonized (or in China's case, merely bossed around - if that's inaccurate, sorry I'm not strong on Chinese history). As a result they lost out on a century of industrial, economic, cultural, and social growth and reform that happened in Europe.
You only have to look at Japan - never colonized, adopted Western technology and ideas organically, is economically advanced today - to see the counterfactual.
Technically India and China were both conquered by Central Asian Warlord societies before Europeans arrived. In India's case by the descendants of Timur, and in China's case due to severe political and environmental issues at the end of the Ming Dynasty. These warlords arguably had even fewer resources and greater militarism than later European conquerors
That was centuries before European colonization began. They recovered, and by the 18th century, were the most prosperous, productive regions of the world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50009485
I see your point, yeah they would manage without others going in and bossing them around. They had everything in place to transition to a modern society unlike some of the less developed parts of the world, so Europeans meddling with them didn't really help.
They would likely follow a similar path as Russia or Japan, Russia is pretty far from western Europe already so ideas took longer to get there so they modernized much later, and we can see how that turned out. Russia being so oppressive and rotten were very vulnerable to any sort of modern ideology and fell to communism, that sort of transition was inevitable for these countries, Russia tried to delay it and it was forced upon them, Japan saw the writing on the wall and made the transition deliberately etc.
The British Empire controlled something like ~20% of the world and other European powers were adding in 10% here and there. Probably more than that weighted by economic and military strength. It is kinda on the British elite that the world wars even started. Even with the most charitable read we're talking about a situation where the message was "lets not break the power of Europe" and they couldn't sell it to Europe.
The world wars were a crisis that caused change, but that is a bit like going bankrupt. Just because the crisis is fast doesn't stop the process being slow.
> Even with the most charitable read we're talking about a situation where the message was "lets not break the power of Europe" and they couldn't sell it to Europe.
That feels like retrofitting a modern frame onto a very different situation? I don't think any of the European elites thought in terms of "the power of Europe" as any kind of unified front vs the rest of the world until after they lost the world wars. It was intra-European conflict as it always had been. England/France/Germany(+)/Spain/Austria against each other; those elites that were unhappy with the fallout of the last great redistribution of power at the Treaty of Utrecht.
(there's probably a chunk of history I'm missing as to how Russia went from enemy of Britain at the Crimean war in the 1850s to the ally in the Triple Entente which caused France and Britain to go to war with Austria-Hungary; but WW1 is definitely not the fault of the any kind of British elite, we can blame it on the Austrians and, of course, the Serbs and ultimately one guy with a gun)
The rest of the world wasn't conceived of as independent powers until the Russo-Japanese war. They were prizes to be allocated among the (European) players. At that time, it was even conceivable that the European powers might take and divide China as they had done with Africa and India.
(+) strictly, Prussia; remember German and Italian unification happened during the Victorian era.
Ww1 and ww2 had a lot to do with Germans lusting after British Imperial greatness (having missed out on large colonization due to lack of national cohesion prior to 1870)
> That feels like retrofitting a modern frame onto a very different situation?
What, the British weren't up the challenge of forecasting a major war in Europe might end badly for them? I mean, I'm sure their leadership didn't, but that is why they don't get to run an empire any more.
> but WW1 is definitely not the fault of the any kind of British elite, we can blame it on the Austrians and, of course, the Serbs and ultimately one guy with a gun
It looks a lot like the fault of the British elite. They failed to use their influence to get a positive result in Europe; which descended into a bonfire over 40 years until it ran out of fuel to burn and half the continent was under the thrall of communism. And if they were doing something productive in the mean time overseas it didn't deliver much result. There'd be an argument that their laissez faire attitude was a problem except they kept actively declaring war on Germany over and over until their empire fell apart.
That generation of British leadership demonstrated no capacity to get positive results apart from a remarkably swift decommissioning of the largest empire ever built. I suppose history can remember them in the positive light that as group they could have failed even worse except they at least had the good sense to bring in US management before the situation became unrecoverable.
The article mentions Churchill who was a major leader in both world wars. He also served as a lancer at the Battle of Omduran and grew up during the time of Empire born smack dab in the middle of the Victorian Era (1870s). His generation formed the leadership of the empire during that period.
The generations BEFORE the Victorian Era enabled it excesses. People who were born IN the Victorian Era (which this article seems to argue were responsible for Britain's success) formed the leadership caste of Britain's ultimate downfall in the World Wars.
The Industrial Revolution was caused by capitalism. As other countries liberalized their economies, the British Empire faded. Even worse, the UK became more socialist over time.
> where they have substantial control over public policy
Substantial influence. The fact that America's rich are constantly mobilizing to promote or defeat ballot measures and candidates shows the limits of their power.
It's doing well on both sides. The Republican Party was just more willing to compromise its values to give them power. The debate over electability in the Democratic Party, on the other hand, is taking longer to manifest, but is probably going to result in far fitter candidates than e.g. Ken Paxton.
> Why is populism doing so well on the right? Is that what the pools of money want?
I think it is. It’s hard to believe Musk doesn’t want China tariffs and he loves the hard right agenda. Those like Thiel have some deeply dubious views.
But it’s not so much the political views as the opportunity that exists at the moment. Give Trump enough money and you can do what you like.
In 2016, Clinton spent $576.4 million and Trump spent $332.4 million. In 2024, total spending including PACs was $1.6B for Biden/Harris and $1.1B for Trump. There was less money behind Trump both times.
"Oxbridge tutors believed overwhelmingly that the purpose of an undergraduate degree was not training for work nor even preparation for academic research, but rather a general moral and intellectual formation that would fit students for any professional role they might later pursue."
This is what the Japanese are still doing; the top companies seek out top achievers regardless of the major, and then employ them, and teach them the things the employee lacks inside the company.
Many private K-12 schools in the US are also doing this. It's the type of education my parents wanted for me, and for college they thought likewise about the importance of liberal arts, in the classical sense of that term (intellectual pursuits as distinct from practical trades).
This type of education is not for everyone, though.
A lot of parents are choosing a public school because it's doing the equivalent of that as well. Private schools can select out the undesirable students, but so long as there's only a few of those your life is better for meeting the undesirable people in the world.
Undesirable is of course is to find different by different people. The larger point is so long as the undesirable people are not overwhelming the school and bringing you down, it's actually good to meet them. Maybe you'll bring them up, but even if you don't, it helps to broaden your viewpoint of the world and helps you to not become a bigot.
Absolutely disagree that it's not for everyone. It's exactly what makes a robust and educated populace. Relegating someone to aircon technician and telling them that makes them just as smart as a liberal arts major is disrespectful to them, if they could but be educated enough to understand it.
this is in part due to the structure of the japanese economy and it's businesses. Businesses hire for life, encourage their employees to experiment, and dip their hands into as many parts of the economy as possible. Compare to America where companies hire and fire at will and build their entire value proposition around specialized products. Only the biggest companies generalize, and even then, within their niche.
Japanese salarymen are not at all "encouraged to experiment", they are forcibly relocated to different roles/departments/cities every few years, regardless of interests or skills. Stories abound of art majors being told to go learn programming, which also explains the generally woeful state of Japanese software.
The higher ups take notes along the way. Those who do well get fast tracked for management, where hands on experience in various roles comes in very handy. Those who don't, on the other hand, end up where they can do the least damage.
This is what most prestigious white-collar firms also do in the west. Think high finance, management consulting.
If you nail the interview, Goldman Sachs won't really care whether you studied Economics or History of Art at Harvard. The main concern is that you studied at Harvard, which signals that you're a high-performer.
Insane that this whole thing never mentions once the legions of servants who did their laundry, cooked their food, poured their Port and generally did all the work.
Because it was not any different from any other aristocracy in the world at the time. The question the article is trying to answer is "why Britain?" Of all the competing european empires what made that particular one especially successful?
Britain was the largest empire in history and covered 25% of the Earth's surface area. What was it which allowed them to become the largest empire in history?
Having lots of ships and not needing a standing army to defend against neighboring countries who share a land border.
A navy is, effectively, mulitpurpose when it comes to trading and colonies and such in a way that an army is not. Therefor countries that can invest only in a navy are at an advantage.
Also, while it is true that the british empire was very large and impressive by almost any measure, and I don't want to downplay it too much, it's worth remembering that a very, very large portion of that empire was made up of the indian subcontinent, and while they certainly had political control over the place, the actual reality was a (very) tiny elite who replaced the previous group of rulers.
Also this empire as described lasted barely 100 years.
A lot of things. The British empire is a master class in financial engineering (largely by luck imo). They started by raising capital via IPOs to create trading companies. The first successful ones were the ones that established the 13 colonies that became the USA and Jamaica.
While they maintained control over those, they engaged in war and looting against the established Spanish empire. They managed to entice the Indian elite by being extremely effective at paying back loans using the loot they got during the Spanish era. Internal division among elite in India meant that the bankers in bengal thought they could use the British for deposing a king they did not like and at the same time handle the raids that the Marathas were performing. The British essentially used the money to bribe the king's army and took control of Bengal (which was the ricebasket for one of the largest empires of the time and the largest cloth producer). Unfortunately for said bankers, once the British took control of bengal they betrayed the bankers who lent them money. They raised an army of local sepoys and went on to take the rest of the subcontinent (although this was a slow painful process).
Even as the US revolted and gained independence, the British found themselves with a growing colony in India where civil wars and divisions between kings made it easy for the British to move in. One thing to remember is that when we talk of a British army at this point it really is an army where the lower ranks are made of Indians who were trying to make a living (as it turns out British were just better paymasters than their local counterparts).
Once they conquered India, they moved east and use Indian soldiers to take on Chinese while waging the opium war (and making a tonne of money from the trade of drugs).
Ive glossed over a bunch of things but honestly the success of the British in the 1800s is built over many many years of multiple investments some of which started in the 1500s (for instance their acquisition of Mumbai was entirely by sheer dumb luck as it was part of a dowry given by the Portuguese, who in turn received it as part of a peace treaty with a local ruler)... Many of the things that brought them success was a result of fairly immoral behaviour. And while their governing class in Europe is fairly small they had massive local administrations run by locals reporting to them.
The navy absolutely was key. But apart from that mercantilism was instrumental. They used trade companies, the most famous being the East India company, as front which allowed the government to deflect responsibility coming their way and this incentivized the moneyed class in Britain as they could "invest" in the colonial loot.
Aren't all empires extractive? How is that supposed to be distinctive to Britain?
If you compare Thailand (never colonized) with India pre-independence, they look about neck-and-neck in terms of development. At a glance, it seems Britain "looted" India to about the same degree that the Thai monarchy "looted" Thailand.
The outward flow of money amd the second order effects like famine make mercantile colonialism more exploitative. A good counterpoint to Thailand is Britain becoming insanely wealthy by contemporary standard during Victorian era.
Sure, the British aristocratic class did exploit the working class. But then we're no longer talking about geographies.
"The outward flow of money amd the second order effects like famine make mercantile colonialism more exploitative."
So why was India's development status comparable to Thailand in that case?
"A good counterpoint to Thailand is Britain becoming insanely wealthy by contemporary standard during Victorian era."
Britain was the first country to industrialize. Switzerland and the US also industrialized early, and did not have a massive colonial population to exploit. But you can see their per-capita GDP was still in the same neighborhood as the UK in the late 1800s:
A lot of stories that Indians tell about their history fall apart when you look at the data. You can argue that Britain delayed India's industrialization, but since most of Asia was not industrializing at the time, it's a bit of a dubious argument. I have little doubt that Britain exploited India, but I don't think it was a historically exceptional type of exploitation.
Non colonized countries like China and Nepal were still semi-colonized due to unfair treaties. Japan which largely remained free did industrialize.
A debate does exist around the how much of India's decline can be attributed to the British as fragmentation of central political authority started long before British arrival.
US and Switzerland had their respective advantages like large domestic market and high value industries. The population of these nations had the time to learn and adapt. The familiarity to western education obviously helped as transferring IP was relatively easy. These opportunities were absent in company ruled India(things did improve marginally once the crown took over). I would largely agree British colonial rule was not exceptional when compared to other mercantile colonies. But I do not see the similarities to Mughal rule of India where the wealth stayed in-house and was even invested locally, the key difference being assimilation vs extraction.
You're still disregarding Thailand. Not colonized, wealth "stays in-house". But that doesn't necessarily lead to industrialization. If the rulers spend the money on entertainment for themselves, that's essentially the same as sending it abroad, from the perspective of a peasant.
IIRC India's GDP was approx. 25% of the world's in 1700s compared to Thai 1% around the same time. In case of India it came down to 3 to 4% in 1947. So India faced quite a drop.
I don't think comparing an already declined India to Thai is a fair comparison.
India's economy didn't get a boost because there was practically no industrial policy. British authorities would get their raw materials at gunpoint from the colonies, ship it to Britain for processing, and then ship the finished goods back to colonies (which were artificially shielded from the international markets).
Before getting absorbed by East India company, some native kingdoms/empites did start with modernizing their military which indicates there would be a strong effort towards industrialization if it weren't for the British regulations.
Unfortunately not many people understand or appreciate how colonialism destroys a country and they just see the end result and claim that the citizens of the country were incapable of developing by their own.
Not only economical, but also psychological (as in lose of self confidence) and cultural (assuming own culture is somehow inferior to the rulers) destruction happens. It is not much different from abused people losing self confidence and blaming themselves and additionallyhaving to suffer victim blaming from others - just at a nation scale.
The legal framework was a big part of the puzzle. Britain's lawyers and legal system were head and shoulders above their peers. Colonies and companies in charge were controlled by complex legal contracts guaranteeing profits to those in charge, from the Crown down.
In most cases, the indigenous populations signed their rights away first through clever negotiation and the companies subsequently used force to enforce their contractual rights. Over time, the companies themselves could not muster sufficient force to maintain status quo as they relied mainly on mecenaries who could only be sourced from the local populations and were notoriously fickle, so the Crown inevitably took charge.
The Industrial Revolution hugely increased production and improved logistics.
The Navy was the best in the world.
There was a capitalist investment culture which linked elements of the aristocracy with inventors and traders, so ventures were relatively easy to fund.
The Royal Society helped spread scientific research and insights.
Private military ventures like the East India Company were closely linked to the state and 'too big to fail' (at least for a while.)
The educational system produced administrators, adventurers, soldiers, and politicians with an unshakeable, almost cult-like, sense of patriotic entitlement.
Britain was isolated physically, which meant the possibility of a distracting land war stopped being a risk after Waterloo, and sea war more or less after Trafalgar.
Basically England was a mature nation state with stable borders and a workable (if brutal and very imperfect) investment-oriented economy, while the other European powers were still fighting each other and - in many cases - trying to self-organise a national identity.
The article says.the education they received was less rigorous than schools in France, Germany or Italy. Despite this and the educational focus on the classics Britain made huge contributions to science and technology. Maybe schools did not matter that much educationally, but did, as you say, create loyalty and character.
Mercantile entities like the East India Company operated with little to no oversight. This is bound to rile up natives rather soon as oppression and loot are the only objectives. Britain had to fold the company to maintain its rule over India(after a revolt).
This is certainly in contrast to something like Norman invasion of England or Mongol invasion of China where the invaders fused with the local culture.
> This is bound to rile up natives rather soon as oppression and loot are the only objectives.
it was a lot more complex than "natives" vs the East India Company. In many places they replaced Mughal rulers who were not natives either. Some groups of natives supported them in order to get rid of rulers or existing oppressive systems (or they did not care because it made little difference to them).
> Norman invasion of England or Mongol invasion of China where the invaders fused with the local culture.
The Normans fused gradually, over time. Longer than British rule in India lasted. There were many cultural influences both ways, as can be seen in language, cuisine, political and legal institutions. British people who remained in India became Anglo-Indians, and much the same happened elsewhere in the Empire.
Local rulers who descended from Mughals were largely considered natives. Taking Siraj-ud-Daulah as example, it's true that the Local population was happy to see him go(at least the non Muslims were) but he was definitely considered a native, especially when compared to Europeans.
The key difference I was trying to highlight with my comment was assimilation vs extraction. By early 19th century, it was pretty clear among British polity that India is to be treated as a colony for resource extraction and nothing more.
How's this different from modern-day "aristocracy"? Don't they get servants who do their laundry, cook their food, pour their Port, and generally do all the work?
> Insane that this whole thing never mentions once the legions of servants ...
OK but we're talking about a period where the UK was the world's first superpower.
I understand you want to portray the despicable conditions of servants living in rich people's houses in Victorian britain but...
Wanna have a talk about the living conditions of people in, say, Eritrea at the same time? (Eritrea has never really been colonized btw so the whole "it's because of colonialism" angle doesn't really work).
Or even just the living conditions of poor people in Britain who happened to not have jobs as servants for the rich?
My great-uncle (a radiologist) and my great-aunt (she had a pharmacy) had a servant during a bit part of their lives, Tess: and she was basically part of the family. Sure she did the laundry and cooking and cleaning but she never struck me as some oppressed human being living in misery. What I remember from visiting them was my uncle in his office, always working (analyzing radio from patients, writing (snail) mails to other doctors, etc.) and Tess always working too: just a different kind of work.
People getting paid to work for other people doesn't imply slavery. We could of course also have a talk about actual slavery, what were the last countries to officially abolish it, who were the biggest slavers in the world, which countries still have actual slaves (and sex slaves) today, etc.
I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.
> I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.
Indeed not. Being in service provided one of the most desirable careers you could hope for as a working class Victorian. When your options look like pit, mill, or factory, cleaning floors in a nice warm house is a good alternative. And that was just the foot in the door: there was progression available. Those jobs were hard to get, prestigious, came with their own status hierarchy, and could keep you set for life.
I did not know that. But almost everybody in the working classes suffered from awful work-related health problems in Victorian Britain. Some vitamin D deficiency for a scullery maid compares to a miner's black lung or that ghastly phossy jaw that afflicted match girls.
I think the best form of this work was probably to be staff on an absentee landlord's estate. While the master or mistress was away, you would have little work to do except cleaning or maintenance, and probably could get away with having a life of leiaure.
Those are just implementation details. Does that contradict in any way the point that the elites were incredibly successful? Read your sentence again: these people created a system where a legion of servants did all sorts of various tasks for them while they partied and enjoyed themselves and the output of that was a globally dominant empire. Sounds unequivocally impressive.
This is addressed near the beginning as the Orthodox view:
> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true.
"Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically."
You mean exactly like rich cunts today? You never hear a politician or a CEO say "boy am I glad all those interns do the bitch work so I can look good on TV".
And also millions of poor and suffering people from the colonized countries. Millions of them died of famine. I'm not sure how much we can learn from those elites.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine^H^H^H^H cricket, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans^H^H^H^H^H British ever done for us?
It did mention the colonial empire up near the beginning.
> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.
> Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well.
The essay is intentionally exploring an alternative to the obvious one. I think the essay does brush off the cruelty of the empire too quickly, but cruelty isn’t inherently profitable, so there’s still some explaining to do.
*inferior to industrialized versions of ancient cultures. The Victorians essentially gave up all sense of their medieval culture (Longbowmen and archer traditions, Yeoman farmers) for immense wealth and new luxuries (Tea, tea houses, Opium, and lots of parties).
This led to their decline within 200 years, compared to China or the Roman Empire. The Chinese had to deal with the incompetent Qing, but luckily they survived as a culture, and learned a lot from Deng Xiaoping.
This is why economics is called "the dismal science"; slaveowners got mad that economists told them having slaves was inefficient and decided the economists were bores.
Countries that were not under an empire also had famines and other disasters (China had a civil war with 50 million killed, IIRC) as well as endemic practices like slavery.
If you had a Rawlsian veil over your eyes, and someone said you could be born in any empire throughout history, but without knowing your place in that empire, which one would you pick?
Those famines were not created by the Victorians. They were all originating in natural disasters that the locals were unable to handle for themselves. The claim that the Victorians did something immoral is an ideological one, as it's effectively a claim that even though they did try to help they could have tried even more - and not rising to that level of assistance (determined arbitrarily by moderns who were not there) was somehow evil.
This view is usually also implying without stating that it is uncharitable or morally wrong for governments to not suspend free markets and impose a communist planned economy the moment there's a natural disaster. That's a highly controversial view (and a wrong one if you want something that works), but it gets slipped into criticisms of the Victorians all the time.
This is the same logic that says shutting down USAID killed people. It's an attempt to convert the possibility of charity into a hard moral obligation - but if accepted, that would make it no longer charity.
Specifically:
• The Victorians did provide aid to Ireland during the potato famine.
• In India they did also provide aid, organized relief camps, suspended tax collection, and spent large sums of taxes and Victorian Brits made large numbers of charitable donations. It didn't look so different to the various aid campaigns for Africa in the 20th century.
• There is no such thing as the "late Victorian Holocaust". That's a concept from a book written by a Marxist in 2000 that argues that capitalism is the same thing as genocide, and frankly seems incredibly offensive to survivors of the actual holocaust.
It´s true that some Victorians organised aid for Ireland during the famine, it is also true that other Vicorians, English origin who were landowners in Ireland courtesy of the Cromwell invasion in the 1650's, exported large amounts of food from Ireland during the famine, to pay some of the bills mentioned in the article. Many land owners in Ireland were heavily in debt, with mortgages on their property. Potatoes were peasant food, and the failure of the crop, combined with lack of control over the food suppliers, led to the death and forced immigrations of millions. The population of Ireland is still lower in the 21st century than it was in the 19th.
So we can take a look at it with 21st century eyes, and consider that actual control is a nebulous thing, and that the absentee landowners were protecting their interests, while some at least of the local ones, including anglo-irish intervened to try and help the people on their estates. but then we also have to dig into the fiasco that is the 1847 Poor Law extension relief act, which sets up systems for relief that effectively dispossess people of their land, and makes the entire thing much worse.
Did the people creating the act understand systemic behaviour well enough to predict the consequences? Do we even understand these things well enough now? The interaction between debt and market pricing, and its inevitable consequences are playing out in real time now with AI.
Ireland produced more food than it needed, even if we don't count potatoes. It was exported, mainly to England, as other markets could pay more. Plenty of other things the victorian's did to make the situation worse. Mainly thanks to free market idealists.
Pre colonial India had famines and many ways to handle them, the British did away with them. The system they set up and replaced made it a lot worse and whatever small trickle of help they provided clearly wasn't enough.
I don't know why you're trying to whitewash colonialism. That it's immoral is pretty simple, they let millions of people die for profit.
> Those famines were not created by the Victorians.
The one in Ireland certainly was. The famine was an outcome of the exploitative economic system that they imposed on the native Irish population. The problem wasn't that there wasn't enough of food available in Ireland (or that it didn't have the capacity to produce enough food). Rather the people living there couldn't afford to buy it and due to free trade/laissez-faire policies imposed by Britain that food was exported to England.
> • The Victorians did provide aid to Ireland during the potato famine.
Yes they gave back a tiny fraction of resources they extracted from Ireland back. Fact is that if Ireland had its own government and wasn't an exploited colony the outcome would have been very different.
Are you really gatekeeping the word 'Holocaust'? The late Victorian Holocaust fits many definitions of the word that are documented in sources like Merriam-Webster. I find your gatekeeping of the word holocaust offensive to survivors of all other non-WW2 holocausts.
Also, why can't capitalism be capable of genocide?
Elites are generally immoral, even today. I mean only in relative terms, they were no worse than others. On the positive side, they did quite a few pro-social things as well (abolition of slavery, for example).
This has it backwards. The Victorian elite had a high standard of life because they had an empire that funded their decadent lifestyle - at the expense of their colonies! They were cushioned from negative consequences of their be debaucherous lifestyle.
Such macro effects exist today as well, in certain countries, that enjoy exorbitant privileges.
A focus on STEM is how a up and coming nation builds itself — innovation, and making something the world wants, rather than subjugation or rent seeking.
The ancestry of the Victorian gentry can be traced back to the late medieval period (and some to the Norman conquest), many centuries before Britain had an empire.
The wealth of the merchant class also predated empire by centuries; the empire grew out of a series of alliances and partnerships of both ot these classes, via the landed gentry successfully co-opting mercantile wealth (e.g. see what happened to the East India Company).
Victorian era was the time when Britain had consolidated its empire in the east and fruits of industrial revolution were ready. I guess that lowered the incentives for innovation. In contrast, Britain made some good scientific progress in the run up to WW2(and the war also expedited some of it, Alan turing's work for instance).
Missing the forest for the trees. Spain had extreme wealth from colonies, but wasted it on nothing but debauchery.
Britain had wealth from colonies and maintained an empire with very few people and no computers. The British elites were on an entirely different level to the spanish ones, which is the point of the article. Great Britain had an extremely capable and educated bureaucracy that maintained an empire and was first to industrialize as a result.
> Spain had extreme wealth from colonies, but wasted it on nothing but debauchery.
I disagree with this, I don't consider "expensive wars with other European powers" to be debauchery.
Losing the entire Spanish Armada [1] was a very expensive mistake, but the reason the Armada was lost was because the Spanish crown wanted to invade England over religious differences (England being Protestant, Spain being Catholic), not because they decided to throw a huge boat party and got so drunk they accidentally sank everything.
Much like the wars of the French crown which would end up so hurting the country financially that they caused a revolution, the wars of the Spanish crown also had a rather unpleasant effect on national finances.
> bureaucracy that maintained an empire and was first to industrialize as a result.
It's not obvious that's what happened. When the industrial revolution started the British empire was still pretty much ad-hoc and in large part privatized and not administered by the government directly (of course the East India company was not exactly an independent corporation). The British Empire in the way we understand it now wasn't really a thing until the mid 1800s or so.
1. Empires do not generate wealth, they cost wealth. Or rather they do not generate an economic surplus (the wealth available to the central government via taxation that can be used for whatever the government/elites want). A nation of 10 million will have more economic wealth than a nation of one million, but most of that is needed to keep the 10 million alive and to maintain the infrastructure and pay the local police to keep everyone in line, etc -- only a small fraction of total wealth can be effectively taxed by the empire and spent on arbitrary stuff like increasing the size of the Navy. That is what I mean by surplus.
A nation starts out with an economic surplus (here, I mean a real surplus, not a surplus of silver, but of real wealth) and they use that surplus to get a big army and go conquering. And each time they conquer, a part of that surplus is expended until they reach their maximum extent.
If this was not the case, we'd have a one world government, where the bigger you get, the bigger your surplus and no one can compete with you. But that is not what we see, what we see is that empires expand until they can't afford to keep expanding. Why did England give up its colonies? Because after WW2 it had too many war debts and couldn't keep subsidizing those colonies -- they were too expensive to keep. Same reason for why Rome stopped expanding and had so many financial problems. The check on empire is always bankruptcy. You can look at the trillions the US spends on foreign wars, which far exceeds the economic benefit we get of waging those wars. You can argue, for example, that we got some oil from Iraq, but we still have to pay for that oil, so whatever discount we got on oil comes nowhere near the cost of invading and administering Iraq. That is how all empires work -- France was always better off, financially, just paying market rate for whatever minerals it could get in Africa than the massive resources it spent on trying to control and build infrastructure in Africa. Same thing for England. It doesn't even come close, when you add up the cost of the British Navy and colonial administration to whatever discount it got on raw materials over paying the market rate. Same thing for Rome, etc.
2. The situation with Spain was about financial wealth, not real wealth. They discovered huge silver mines in their colonies and were awash with silver. That dumping of money 1) created massive inflation, and 2) caused Spain to run a huge trade deficit, destroying domestic industry, as the Spanish currency was basically overvalued. It was this economic destruction that leads people to think Spain became lazy and stopped producing. They didn't become lazy, but with so much free money causing such high prices, Spanish industry could no longer be competitive with industry elsewhere. This is called "Dutch disease" as the same thing hit Holland and you also see it in the US with our overvalued currency. So you do not benefit, in terms of real wealth, when you dump a bunch of money on a country. You need just the right amount of money -- too much and you get inflation, too little and you get deflation. There is an optimal amount of money for an economy, and Spain exceeded it.
3. Many have studied the reason why England led the industrial revolution, and it is not a majority view that it had anything to do with the colonies. Most point to things like the availability of coal, development of financial markets, and of course the fact that a lot of the steam engine stuff was invented first in England.
1. War costs wealth not empires by themselves. GB created an empire, because their technological and intelligence advantage was so high, the amount of war needed to get it was small. By intelligence I mean the conquering of India by exploiting its cast system. The colonies were simply civilizations that were out of date and had a huge informational disadvantage. WW2 changed that as it was so expensive it bankrupted everyone but the US.
> Same reason for why Rome stopped expanding and had so many financial problems. The check on empire is always bankruptcy.
The down fall of every empire is hubris and corruption. It is what is bankrupting the US and what bankrupted the Romans. They stopped having kids, spent their time partying and tried to make up for it by importing and relying on barbarians.
2. Yes. But the state did not recognize the trap or simply did not care because it was not interested. I'm not exactly a historian, but Spain was somewhat known for having an inbred idiotic monarchy.
3. All of which are a result of an educated, effective elite and bureaucracy.
Competent leadership is the difference between El Salvador now and 10 years ago. It is the difference between Singapore and Malaysia. Both countries are a result of pure force of will of competent leadership.
1. You need to pay for civil administration
2. You need to put down rebellions, which means staffing it with troops/police
3. You have to build and maintain infrastructure
4. You have to protect the empire from foreign invasion -- e.g. Julius Caeser needing to fight the Helvetii
5. You have to pay bribes to local notables to be loyal to you
Let's take a look at Rome in Palestine - it had to constantly put down rebellions, build an enormous temple and civil infrastructure, man the area with troops that need to be paid, fight off invaders. Pay off all sorts of locals.
And yes, a big part of that is military expenditure, but the role of the British Navy was not primarily to enlarge the empire but to preserve the empire, protect shipping lanes, etc.
> The down fall of every empire is hubris and corruption.
This is a moralizing view of history, and things just don't work like this.
While civil administration, police, courts, infrastructure and army all do cost, wealth, I would argue that they also help to create it.
It's a lot easier to create a software company when you live in a world where the power station cannot be held for ransom by bandits, where everyone is educated and speaks a similar language, when there are laws governing the creation of businesses, a financial system, backed by the government, which enables trade to happen easily, etc.
For example, the Roman Empire, in unifying the Mediterranean, led to a large increase in trade - you can estimate shipping volume across the Mediterranean by counting shipwrecks, and the period of ~0-150AD when the Empire was at its peak had a much higher volume of shipping than preceding and following periods.
I think of administration, police, legal and financial system as something like a capital investment - a bit like buying a widget producing machine - you spend the money/effort/resources on it because you expect to get more out of it than you put it.
Corruption is objectively negative. The east indian company not generating wealth is objectively wrong. The roman and british empires were not the same and the roman one required way more war to maintain.
> but Spain was somewhat known for having an inbred idiotic monarchy.
Spain wasn't even a really country until the 1700s it was a collection of states ruled by the same monarch but each of them had their government apparatus and elites whose interests didn't exactly align with that of Castile or the king all of the time. That's just in Iberia, the Low Countries which in the early 1500s were effectively the economic and political centre of what we think of as the "Spanish Empire" caused even more issues and ended up being a huge money sink.
I do not think they are tech geniuses, but the original statement was not limited to tech "geniuses". Overwhelming majority of STEM people are not geniuses.
But Musk specifically is/was admired and supported by STEM people and culture. He was untouchable for years. Tech people share ideologies and ethical values of Zuckenberg, Musk, Amodei, you name it. Tech educated people spent years developing those philosophies and defending them.
> Academic life was dominated by Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. The exact share varied, but the classical languages took up generally at least half of teaching hours, and sometimes as much as 80 percent, especially earlier in the century.
That's so weird to me. How did that tradition hold on for so long? Where did it come from? Who thought that was a good idea?
This theory continues in modern elite American Universities -- they exist not to provide job skills but to deliver a "liberal education" -- one that teaches students to think, be moral, etc. (I read from the brochure here).
Those Ivies that have more job-oriented programs tend to have (at the least) those schools looked down upon in comparison to the more 'pure' academic pursuits, e.g. Cornell's Hospitality school.
While Ivies are not tied strictly to America's true upper class, serving more as a means of entry into the upper-middle and lower-upper, this sort of signaling is an important part of some of the soft benefits they provide students -- it would be gauche to be worried about a job, ne c'est pas?
It's a thing in other countries as well. Schools which teach the classical languages in Belgium are called humaniora (literally 'more human'). About 30% of my classes were Latin and ancient Greek but we would also have more in depth art history classes.
They would lack in other education (like math and sciences) in theory but as it's also the place the best students get their education they tend to just force you to learn both (which is against some protocols afaik).
USA universities have lately corrupted the meaning of the word "liberalism", turning it into its opposite. So-called "liberal education" doesn't exist anymore.
Also also hard to fake and easy to slip in. You throw in a Latin quote in your conversation and either the other person gets it and you both know you're the proper class, or they don't and you both know you're higher up the ladder than they are.
Cost of a signal is not necessarily just the resources required to emit it, but also what that signal represents to others. Throwing slurs around doesn't take any money but can be very costly.
If someone has modified their appearance in a way that appears foolish and their intent was to signal intelligence then I my prior would be that they are extra foolish.
Instead if they know Latin then my prior assumption would be that they are intelligent.
Acquiring information is costly (multi armed bandit) which is why signaling is important. Perhaps in the future with AI and attestations we can replace expensive signals with cheaper ones that are more difficult to fake and thus more honest.
With the improvements in machine intelligence I have become much less concerned with human intelligence and only persist with disagreeing with netizens out of a quickly fading residual sentimentality.
Remember that religious study was the driving force behind much of the education that went on for a long time. If you view some version of the bible as literal divine word, learning the language it's written in makes sense.
The Catholic church only allowed mass to be delivered in a language other than Latin in the 1960s. If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.
The Anglican church (to which virtually all of the Victorian elite belonged) had phased out Latin since the 17th century. Likewise Victorian scientists, eg Darwin, wrote in English. (If they needed to correspond with their peers abroad, they might use Latin, but many would learn French, German, Russian...)
Its use in the Catholic church probably helped Latin survive as long as it did, but by the 19th century it was already an impractical relic whose prestige in English schools came partly from the fact that it had no actual application.
you're wrong the church originally did the Mass in Rome in Greek and it allows it in several other languages in other regions from the beginning. When the Mass was changed to latin in Rome it was the speaking language of the people. Learning latin was about important for most of the western history because pretty much every important book was written or translated to Latin
> If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.
What an absolutely bonkers concept. I mean, how dare they. I am shocked, I tell you! Shocked! Outrageous. I mean, the Catalonians treated me the same way when I visited Catalonia. I finally just gave up and went home.
The Eastern Orthodox (and other pre-schism apostolic) churches vigorously promote the liberal use of the vernacular in many cases. Even those which had a rather ossified "sacred liturgical" language sort of moved with the times.
With the story about the Roman Catholic Church, it is important to note that the Council of Trent was pivotal here. Trent essentially decreed to suppress/abolish many, many localized liturgies, and replace them all with the Roman-style liturgy. The Latin Church was quite diversified up until that point in the 16th century. Trent looked forward to a truly global and universal church that needed a central point of unity and cohesion. A singular liturgy was ideal to ensure that abuses were minimized and everyone was "playing according to Hoyle" because, as you may recall, two huge continents had just opened up for evangelization beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
So in the days before French became the lingua franca of the U.N. and the world, Latin was truly the proto-lingua-franca. Latin could transmit ideas amongst many people and be well-understood. Latin crossed borders, in ways that German or Euskara or Finnish could not. That is an extremely valuable aspect of a language, and that is why we value English, and Mandarin in much the same way in the 21st century.
The Church did not, however, prevent you from reading Sacred Scripture in the vernacular. The Douay-Rheims was a contemporary of the KJV and many English versions have been produced since then. Many, many vernacular Catholic Bibles. So essentially, if you knew your Scripture, you'd probably figure out the Mass anyway by following along. And as they say, "actions speak louder than words" and also, "a picture is worth 1,000 words" so the act of attending Mass was never quite wasted, as you'd hope to portray.
p.s. The "literal divine Word of God" is Jesus Christ. The Bible, for its part, came later than Jesus, and itself is a product of Sacred Tradition.
The term comes from the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Yes grammar is literally part of it but more generally it's the learning of facts and definitions.
To know another language is to possess a second soul - Big Chuck aka Charlemagne.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote an entire journal in Greek in the middle of enemy territory. "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.". Historians criticize his Greek fluency.
The Romans and the Greeks provided a lot of their thinking. They provided models for their buildings and for the empire. The Romans wrote about the way they ran their empire, controlled local tribes and so on... They also provided a rationale for the civilising mission (as they perceived it).
Latin and Greek were useful for coining a lot of the new vocabulary that English had to create for science, industrialisation and overseas adventures.
>In Western civilization, the study of the ancient Greek and Roman classics was considered the foundation of the humanities, and they traditionally have been the cornerstone of an elite higher education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classics
Apparently Oxford only dropped the requirement to have O-Level latin in 1960 (!)
Academia in Britain was intimately connected to membership of the church and, thus, to the ability to speak Latin to hold services. It held on beyond that tenure out of both momentum and prestige.
I agree, but latin was the language of the educated in Europe because of the (Catholic) church, and the universities pre-date the C of E by several hundred years.
I was going to answer with just "the church" but the OP specifically asked about academia.
It was the language of the educated because of the Roman Empire. The elites used to study how to be Roman elites before the 5th century, and when Rome fell they just continued, as it was the established sign of higher class. The elite has been educated by Cicero for the last 2 millennia, and continues to be so.
A good analogy is French being the language of the elite in Britain, well after the Normans got merged into the general population.
> and when Rome fell they just continued, as it was the established sign of higher class.
Well not in the west where the elite was replaced by uneducated barbarians for several centuries and it took quite a while for the church to teach them how to read and write again.
Yes, I know. Why the confidence that this contradicts anything I said?
Edit: Re-reading I realise you were reading that as me thinking the books weren't written in Latin, whereas I was trying to get the parent poster to think a bit beyond "the books were written in Latin" to wonder why they might be written in Latin long, long after the fall of the Roman Empire.
> Newton wrote his major work in Latin, for example.
Newton wrote in Latin because he was, famously, an arrogent bellend. The rest of the sensible scientific community had long since swiched to living langauges.
> Why do you think all animal species have a latin name?
Good god! This proves you have _completely_ missed the point!
The reason scientic names are in lattin, is BECAUSE it is a dead language. The scientific name can therefore never be confused with the many local/regional names for a species which will always be in a living langage.
Lol… It's because Linneus wrote in latin (a quick look on wikipedia will confirm)… because he wanted other intellectuals to be able to read his works.
Also your theory fails flat in the entirety of south america, some parts of africa and europe where the "local/regional" names are just… the old latin names still used today.
(Modulo d'oh because of the industrial revolution and the relatively easy wealth extraction that that enabled;) because the British public had internalized (I would venture to this day) the distinction between upstairs and downstairs and did not present a revolutionary risk to the elite. This then allowed the wise decision of the elite to permit social mobility to those who would work to further the broader cause of the Empire, in all domains including sciences. This is likely a very goldilock moment for any civilization: higher valuation of reason over dogma; a techological and economic production jump that enabled a categorical raising of one nation over many others; a mass population that did not think less of its 'betters' because they were slothful extravagents (as long as they 'acted' superior); and finally the creation of a productive and resourceful middle class that was satisfied to help in the administration and operation of an enterprise that was deemed a national cause: the empire.
What a fantastic read. An interesting perspective on schooling. I've been thinking a lot lately if booze is actually a useful thing, it seems the Victorians saw that it is.
As regards sports, I attended a public school [note the terminology here as per the article], and we still had the "three half day" system. Those of us who were hopeless at sports could actually pursue personal interests in some of those afternoons, but I think that was an innovation.
Completely faulty premise. The British Empire was already globally dominant before the Victorian era. You cannot attribute success nor failure to something that came after the fact; I suppose the Victorian elites were not time travelers. That the Empire has since collapsed does not give an especially strong vote of confidence in their stewardship, however.
Moreover, the article presupposes the notion that STEM is associated with "success", but it has never been associated with the elite in any capacity. Generously, STEM might be considered elite for a peasant. Let us not forget who the current US president is, or the general makeup of both the American and British political systems. Hint: it's not composed of scientists and engineers.
Yeah, exactly. British power came from technological advancements that occurred before the Victorian era: steam engine, spinning jenny, railways, electricity, etc. By the time the elite depicted in this article was running the country, they were largely inheriting that technological lead, and arguably had already lost it by the turn of the 20th century.
This really is the takeaway for me. The elites of the Empire come off as lazy and ignorant even when Britain has a massive massive technological lead from the work of organizations like the Royal Society.
The scientific advantage was enormous, and it seems like virtually none of these elites bothered to study the sciences. During that era, the elites of other countries were far, far more ignorant. Compare the socializing and partying of the Victorians with the opium addicted and superstitious Manchurian Emperors of China or the hereditary inbred nobility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they come off as absolutely industrious.
While Victorian elites were partying it took about 50 years for the Japanese to go from a fully Feudal Society to reaching parity with the Royal Navy (1868-1922).
Disclosure: I did not read the whole thing. I, too, felt the premise was faulty and not worth reading beyond.
First paragraph: "Once adulthood is reached, life follows an austere pattern, with a 5am start, cold baths, daily visits to the gym, little or no alcohol, a Huel-rich diet, and Stakhanovite working hours. This last point generates particular excitement, and descriptions of powerful people dwell with eager fascination on how many hours they devote to their labors."
Why are we taking the CEOs words at face value? They are notoriously known for doing and saying whatever will most help them succeed. Do they say they do these things? Sure. Do we know if they do? If they look like they workout, they probably do, but otherwise how do we know what they do with their day? Anyone who probably actually does know probably has to sign some crazy NDA. Will lying about their routine help them succeed? Quite possibly. CEOs rarely work their way up in the same company over decades, starting on the factory floor. They are MBAs that hop from one company to the next. So they are incentivized to promote some kind of mystique about themselves to make them seem more deserving over the next hopper. Knowing the lack of ethics associated with CEOs, it is not a stretch to assume there is a lot of fluffery in their self-proclaimed routine.
>STEM is associated with "success", but it has never been associated with the elite in any capacity
Except perhaps in China in recent decades where it's worked rather well for them.
(>China’s leadership understands and emphasizes R&D.
Eight of the nine members of China’s Standing Committee of
the Political Bureau, including China’s current President Hu
Jintao, have engineering degrees. 2011)
The decline and fall was within a lifetime. Not just a random person's lifetime, but that of a single famous individual. By any of the usual endpoints (Indian Independence, Suez Crisis, Winds of Change/South Africa's withdrawal from the Commonwealth) the Empire ended while Winston Churchill was alive- he was born in the 1874, at the height of the Empire, graduated Sandhurst and joined the British Army in 1895, took Queen Victoria's shilling in several colonial wars, then was Secretary of State for the Colonies in the 1920s, and died after Britain had withdrawn from most of her African holdings.
Within a lifetime or so, which is certainly within a range you would expect for a global empire to collapse; that rarely happens overnight. That said, it is an unfalsifiable supposition, as much as the article's supposition is, although I framed mine in less certain terms than the article claiming it as factual that said elites were effective.
Mentioning those two dumb dumbs in connection with Winston Churchill, Bismarck, Cromwell, come on, they are not in the same league as Truman, Eisenhower, Grant Lincoln, Tecumseh Sherman, Theodore Roosevelt, the list is very long… Where you can dump them however is in a position right next to Pete Hegseth, or Joseph McCarthy.
As for condescension, I'll kindly note that it was you who was instructing me how to engage people and how I should be writing. When someone is writing a statement that directly contradicts even the news of the past few days, I have to ask if they are sure. I'm not sure if I can be much more deferential than that.
No mention of survivorship bias, or observational bias - framing it as the most 'effective' empire of the time, rather than it was simply 'less bad' than the others. I'd like to have read about maybe the Belgians or French in comparison, and what they did that was 'less effective'.
It ends with this American-centric paragraph:
> Would modern societies work better if their local and national government were conducted by a tight-knit community of extremely rich and successful people? Maybe not: the downsides are obvious. But the problems would be interestingly different from those that they have in reality. Imagine a San Francisco whose Board of Supervisors featured Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, each feeling this responsibility to be the greatest glory of his career, each hoping that he might one day attain the greater glory that is the House of Representatives. It might not be paradise. Maybe it would be a disaster. But it would certainly be interesting.
Well, the Chinese Politburo is 21 people that run a country of (maybe) 1bn people. The progress of China and the lifestyles of a billion people over 40 years is pretty remarkable.
I think this isn't about ethics at all and I wonder why you think it is. It is about size, economics and power of the UK empire in the 1800s. Not being (as much of) a cruel tyrant tends to help with all of these, though.
I didn't once mention ethics, and I wonder why you think I did. Perhaps my last comment? That simply states, and nothing more, that there is a small number of powerful (if not rich) people in control of what might now be the largest empire on Earth today if you measure it by economic output and control (sorry USA), which is what the article talks about: a small group of people, in the 1800s British Empire. History repeating itself, but differently. Power is always concentrated.
Also the article starts with an implicit assumption of survivorship/observational bias, the title being 'Why were Victorian elites so effective?' - the assumption that they really were 'effective' or was the rest of the world simply worse and they were simply the 'least worst'? That line of enquiry was not even discussed.
Seems like a lot of luck could be framed as effectiveness. How much of the British empire was the result of the actions and ideas of the masses of the lower classes?
Think about how important some of the actions and ideas of regular employees of a company can be to the company's success. Now imagine your boss's boss wrote 90% of the future sources of your company's history. How much of the success of regular employees is going to be attributed to the leader versus the boss? How much is glossed over or forgotten just for brevity's sake? A company can still succeed even with a kinda shitty boss if it still has stellar employees, provided the shitty boss doesn't stand in the way. But how many companies can succeed with an amazing boss but shitty employees?
I'm currently reading Andrew Carnegies autobiography. Highly recommend it!
He lived around the same age.
He benefitted from his employees ideas and initiatives. But that was by design. Both design of the organisation, design of the incentive structures, and the filters used for hiring.
Companies are just a collective of people trying to accomplish something.
The idea that an incompetent boss, could attract talent that would be willing to force great outcomes, without due compensation/incentives, doesn't sound like a credible explanation for the mean story of success.
I was at the Carnegie museum in Dunfermline a few years ago. His childhood home was not particularly big and his origins in Scotland were ordinary. What was of interest was how some of his philanthropy parallels more recent versions... He wasn't just behind fantastic libraries and so on, he was pouring money into proto-globalist organisations much like the Rockefellers more recently.
I think part of the story is the competent Civil Service that deployed the newly created educated middle class. This competent machinery, and very firm social norms in place, the toffs (aristocracy) could delegate a lot of managerial work in addition to the labor they’d delegated for centuries.
I think that extreme prosperity like this (another example - Baby Boomers in the US) is a lagging indicator of geopolitical/industrial power.
Britain was prosperous in the 1800s because of colonialism and the industrial revolution. The US was prosperous in the second half of the 1900's because they capitalized on not being decimated by WW2.
IMO Britain's success in this era was actually sustained prosperity driven by the working class, and the failure to maintain global leadership followed from the victorian attitude of the elite.
They got nothing on American Elites - the current regime is packed to the gills with TV personalities who are incapable of actually doing their nominal jobs, yet they've all done extremely well for themselves.
This article really should not be surprising - the elite go to school to learn to rule - to socialize and develop networks of trust. Doing stuff is for the class below (PMC in today's terms).
> Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically.
I'm surprised this obvious explanation is handwaved away.
> We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test.
Sure...
> Books about successful people often make success sound rather unappealing. Education should be intense and rigorous, focused on driving up IQ and on the ‘STEM’ quaternity of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Once adulthood is reached, life follows an austere pattern, with a 5am start, cold baths, daily visits to the gym, little or no alcohol, a Huel-rich diet, and Stakhanovite working hours.
Books about succesful people tend to focus on these types of hard working ones who build their own wealth. It's more interesting than "hey this rich person got rich from their parents". But the modern elite has enough parasitical rich people who would fit more with the Victorian elites, living mostly off of their parents' wealth and connections, think Paris Hilton, Miss Heineken, the Chinese Fuerdai or the modern nobility.
Based on the premise it seems the author just has gripes with STEM focus and efficiency culture. That seems like a legit standpoint, but it's so weird to try to use Victorian elites to support this point. What about looking at the working class, that actually, you know, puts in all the work?
Lots of debate about luck vs achievement here. Just wanted to point out: they definitely did succeed in not being slaughtered and replaced. So in that sense they owned their success.
The modern elite education doesn't seem that different. If you ignore the weird Bay Area tech bro invented prep schools, your tech elites are mostly from the same few institutions. Forget about Eton, the Phillips Exeter to Ivy pipeline is pretty strong. If you look at the high school backgrounds of the Silicon Valley top founders, they are all mostly cut from the same cloth regardless of how "middle class" they all try to pretend to be.
I would say that being sexually abused by older boys (which what the male relationships at schools largely were) was in any way healthy of helpful to anyone.
I think its possible that humanities based education made for efficient administrators.
I mean the male romantic relationships the article mentions. I did not think this was even contentious with regard to these - its generally known. The "self-government" the article talks about was largely by giving older boys enormous power over younger ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagging
Its mentioned in many memoirs and biographies. Even when apparently consensual the younger boys were far too young to meaningfully consent, especially given disparities in age and power
This is an especially vacuous article. The elites the author lauds clearly did very little and the “great men of yore” trope is more than a little tired at this point.They did one thing well; ride the wave of technological innovation and utilize security provided by the British navy to conduct commerce. Sarah Pain credits Englands success as the result of mature institutions and a maritime order the royal navy provided ie access to markets. Even today the some of the most profitable enterprises place themselves between transactions (ads, payment networks, etc).
Crediting Britain's elites with the nineteenth century is like crediting Visa with inventing shopping.
> Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically
This leads to two important questions:
1: How much did the Victorian elite really know about the "hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed"?
2: How much power did they really have to end this oppression?
Let's look at a fact and implication:
1: The Victorian Elites were born into, and groomed for, their position in their social hierarchy. They knew of no other position.
2: Their incentives were to maintain their lifestyle, and by proxy, others' lifestyles.
What I take from this:
Economies and supply chains are complicated, and the decision makers at the top have far less power than we think they do. If the elites chose to pass laws to end oppression, what would happen? I suspect that food prices and clothing prices would skyrocket, which would then cause some kind of social unrest, which would then push the elites out of their position.
Or, a greater lesson to take from this is that leadership is always incentivized to maintain the current social order; and that social change comes about from outside pressure; and that outside pressure for change only works when the change is to maintain a status quo elsewhere.
It’s a fictional series of course, but one of the smaller details that I am always aware of is how individuals and corporations seemed to be more geopolitically aware, and deliberately trying to “help” the British Empire, directly or indirectly. And the governmental structures were equally as interested in their local interests succeeding. (Often at ethically horrible things, I should add.)
I feel like in the contemporary era, this dynamic doesn’t really exist. American corporations abroad don’t seem particularly interested in supporting the American empire. They are more disconnected from the state they ostensibly belong to, and are far more international and selfish. So there really isn’t the same kind of singular cohesion that was there in the British empire.
> descriptions of powerful people dwell with eager fascination on how many hours they devote to their labors
A point of interest for me is how they end up counting basically anything as working hours because the barrier between work and life has effectively dissolved. Elon Musk for example seems to spend an inordinate amount of time shitposting for someone who claims to work up to 100 hours a week.
But precisely that such "work" is totally self directed makes it significantly different from other forms of work in that it's totally self-defined and practically any activity could be captured within that definition.
So a lot of this mythos of long hours from the wealthy I think is just empty status building for the most part.
Personal gripe - but I absolutely despise the term 'elites'. The emotive implication is always that there is a group of people that are just categorically better than everyone else, but on closer examination you find an equally (if not more so) flawed group of people which exhibit some of the worst traits and characteristics towards their fellow humans.
Beyond their ability to extract money from anyone around them, I fail to see what is 'elite' about the group of people we currently assign the same classification to.
I'm probably just salty that I'm not rich, is all...
The problem is that you are quarreling with the connotation, but the way it’s being used that you object to is a clear direct definition, specifically:
“a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence”
Interesting - you're correct. And the definitions say nothing about morality or ethics, only 'hard' factors that include intellectual pursuits, wealth and power.
Dunno. Just feels like it reinforces my view unfortunately. But a good call out anyway.
Honestly, the elites are categorically better, on average. Not flawless by any mean but in many ways superior.
The Victorian elites had better education, better diet, better lifestyles, better care, etc... So yes, it makes for smarter and healthier people.
If you mean in term of human qualities like morals, kindness, ethics, etc... This is complicated. Many of the elites also tend to be better in that regard too, with a very big caveat. The reason why they are better is simple: it is easier to be generous when you are not in the need, education can play a part too but it can go both ways.
The thing that make elites worse is mostly the consequence of their actions, the "with great power comes great responsibilities" thing. What is an inconsequential for the poor can have huge implication when the rich do it. If you decide to stop buying bread from one bakery will not impact that bakery too much, they loose and gain customers all the time. If you have a restaurant chain and decide to stop working with a baker, you may have ruined him.
That's when things become more complicated, sometimes the elites really are terrible to the people under them, sometimes, they are as good as humans can reasonably be, noblesse oblige. In history, it is not uncommon, when there is a revolution and power is given back to the people to end up very badly.
I don't know how Victorian elites sit on this scale, certainly not all bad, certainly not all good (especially to the colonies), but where exactly is hard to say.
I am definitely middle class, being raised in a middle class family and most people I know are also middle class. Definitely not elite, and I have nothing to do with Peter Thiel, the only thing I know about him is that he is a controversial billionaire.
But most of the times I met people of a high socioeconomic status, they turned out to be really nice and interesting, more commonly hiding their wealth than flaunting it. Sure enough there is the occasional prick, and they are particularly detestable because of how unfair it feels, so they stand out. But they are a minority, at least in my experience.
Note that by "high socioeconomic status", I mean something like the 1%, not the 0.001%, maybe things are different at that level, but I can hardly approach it. But from those who did, it was mostly positive, from a human to human perspective. But these are just second degree anecdotes.
The thing is, when discussing the elite, most people talk about news reports, business decisions, declarations, etc... When they are discussing lower-middle class, they are talking about personal experience, for understandable reasons. We rarely get "I had dinner with Peter Thiel, we talked about the impressionist style of painting and how he commissioned an artist to decorate the guest bedroom in this style" (completely made up story), that is, the small details that make people feel human.
I've had the opposite experience. I've found more middle class people who have a broader education (art, science, technology, literature, etc), than supposed 'elite' people.
I remember a particularly fun conversation where a very wealthy individual (one of the said 'elites') was in a conversation with a lead scientist from one of the CRIs here, and starts going off on a tangent about the energetic components of ley lines and their personal significance to him. Similar views against vaccinations etc etc.
Because of the definition of elite centering around money, power and 'hard' education (e.g. a PhD in a hard science), I've found those people to generally be more shallow but hyper-focused in fewer areas. They may very well achieve highly in that given area, but tend to be uninteresting and unbalanced in most other areas.
I've similarly observed those people to as emotionally unbalanced as the rest of us, but in some cases more childish and petulant when they feel they've been wronged in some way.
Maybe what we're both describing are the extremes of the curve, I'm not sure.
this is quite the statement. i can think of many, many ways they are not categorically “better” … many ways.
i can think of a number of “peasants” who are categorically “better” than “elites” in many, many areas.
i mean, i think most of us here have personally met at least one or two absolute failsons who are absolute dipshits yet will always fall upwards due to who their families are.
It wasn’t solely the Victorian elites — it was the entire elite part of the world in that era. Benefits of second Industrial Revolution, broadly peace, open borders and free trade compared to most of human history, etc. WW1 was a terrible end to (for much of the world; notably excepting China) one of the best periods of human civilization.
I ought to be surprised at the vague glazing of the victorian aristocracy in 2026, but this is hackernews we're talking about. I've no doubt a lot of you would exploit people less fortunate than you for personal gain given the chance, and then turn around and type away about how its 'ermm ackshully a good fing'. unironically , getting their lunch money stolen would've probably been the most valuable lesson on ethics and exploitation they'd get.
I think many here rationalize it as their reward for being clever or fast, and consider the consequences for the rest as natural (in a "Darwinistic" sense) and thus unavoidable. This saves the trouble of being empathetic.
precisely. the types to pat themselves on the back for their "self-made" merits, neverminding the shoulders of countless giants they stand upon, the sheer geographic and financial luck they were most likely born into, etc. I wonder if on some level they believe it to be their birthright the same way the aristocracy of the old did. I can't blame them though, there are forces much larger than them at play, and this quite honestly has been by design; not by some big amorphous boogeyman, but through culture.
I mean seriously people are defending Victorian England as if an entire genra of art (social realism) was not created to describe the horrors of industrialism at the time.
> Most students at both preparatory and public schools were boarders, meaning that elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family. In this respect they were distinctive even in their own time: elite families in continental Europe and the United States were far more likely to keep their children at home and educate them at small local private schools. It is plausible that this contributed to the lack of subnational loyalties in the British elite, in contrast to the distinct elites of, for example, the Southern United States, Catalonia in Spain, or Hungary in the Austrian Empire
Less developed, more dysfunctional countries tend to have closer family ties. More developed countries tend to have looser family ties. Sending children to boarding school starting at age 8 is a good way to diminish family ties.
Those who automatically gain leverage of information network, rent seeking, and labor superiority are able to use immense leasure time to better process directional changes. This isnt' automatically true, many Victorian elites went bankrupt, but it is true for some.
What the protestant work ethic is either wrong or intentionally dishonest about, is hard work may inform you of the technicalities of labor, but it rarely gives you the time, enenrgy or education to understand its organizational effeciencies or opportunties.
This is incredibly timely as we have stories and visual evidence of our current oligarchs clearly high on drugs, drunk, or generally indifferent in a leaisure way to the serious science of running our society and business, yet seem to continually get the upper hand in doing it.
WIP drifts more and more towards 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible'.
Apart from 1 word in the intro 'parasitically' and not a single mention of slavery, child labour (but boarding schools), women (but very consistent use of 'men') or colonialism (apart from it being used as a _credential_) the entire article literally argues that 'Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg' should run a techno-oligarchy of the absolute worst people?
On the other hand the article seems to be unaware the Victorian empire went down and bankrupt because of its decadency, not being able to foresee let alone counter events such as the Indian independence, Japanese offensive and end of slavery alongside its change in economic primitives (see e.g. 'Capitalism and Slavery'). In that sense the article is maybe spot on, showing how completely disconnected the elites are?
They weren't 'effective'. It was colonialism. The Victorian 'elites' just stole everything that wasn't nailed down and didn't need to work as a result which was a system that eventually failed. There's a reason the monarchies and feudalism failed.
The Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833; the government got deep into debt to reimburse the owners for their former slaves. That is not the whole story, of course, but the abolition of slavery before Victoria's reign was one of the brighter spots of British history.
Something I've always wondered: What keeps the guards and thugs of the ""elite"" from just killing the elite and taking their money and position?
The boss usually doesn't have any actual physical strength (unless maybe you're Genghis Khan or something)
Imagine 2000 years ago: A merchant prepares a caravan of goods to trek across the wilderness to a far-off settlement. He hires some guards. He sells the goods and pays off the guards a portion of the profits.
What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?
Or a landlord hires some goons to go beat up a tenant for not paying rent on time. Why don't the goons beat up the landlord and take the income from ALL his properties?
Or, after a miserly old oligarch pays off his bodyguards a few times, they'll eventually learn where he keeps all his money. What keeps them from torturing him to give it all to them?
Why didn't Bronn just stomp Tyrion Lannister? He could literally SEE the chest where Tyrion kept all the gold! Why walk around with him and risk getting injured or slain?
> He hires some guards. He sells the goods and pays off the guards a portion of the profits.
> What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?
You shouldn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Let the merchant do the merchanting and make the profits and you hang out and get your paid vacation.
If you take all the profits, the merchant won't stay in the business and then you don't have a client.
I mean, Ceasar's assassination 2,069 years ago showed that no matter how much "power" the "system" agrees you have, you could be removed at any time by the person standing next to you with a dagger.
Ceasar's assassination was politically motivated, and performed by many of the most powerful people at that time - other Roman Senators.
I'd describe it more as a power struggle between 'elites'/the people running the country that got violent (indeed, it led to a civil war), rather than a "even the rich are at the mercy of random violence".
In other word, Ceasar dying is basically 'the system' at the time, the Roman Senate, or at least a large part of it, deciding that, actually, Ceasar had a little too much power, and the way to fix that was stabbing him.
I view it closer to Louis XVI being guillotined than Franz Ferdinand being assassinated - the former is a violent transfer of power between elites, the later is an elite being killed by a member of the common people. The former happens because the elites (and sometimes the people as well, although AFAIK Ceasar was quite popular with the commoners in Rome) are unhappy, the later happens despite the elites being happy. The Vienna upper-class probably quite liked Franz Ferdinand, but that wasn't enough to save him. The Parisian upper-class, however, did NOT like Louis XIV, and that got him killed. Similarly, the Roman aristocracy (or rather, a large chunk of it, obviously Ceasar had his fans in the Senate) had an issue with Ceasar, which got him killed.
You need the backing of social organization. Who gets to replace the elite positions or obtains or distributes their wealth? It takes a lot of work to build real consensus for people to just be like "okay, sure!"
And nobody in power is going to allow you to organize to any real extent before interseding. They force you to play with their rules to get in the game. The only away around it is to already be a well known and publically liked figure that people will rally behind.
All hierarchies work like that. In order for the top to gain benefit from wielding the power of the entire hierarchy of lessers, it necessarily means that the coordinated power of each level is greater than that above them (at least on average).
Take a simplified model of a king, a bunch of nobles, beneath whom are a bunch of knights, beneath whom are a bunch of serfs. Collectively, the nobles control more power than than the king. But if an individual noble defects while the others remain loyal, then the King maintains enough power to crush the uprising. So as the King, you have to proactively maintain a status quo where the nobles can't easily collectively plot against you. Classic strategies include maintaining some kind of nebulous ranking, where nobles are constantly competing with each other to garner favor, and thus likely have more to gain outing a rival noble's conspiracy than joining it, keeping the nobles sufficiently comfortable such that the risk of losing that comfort acts as friction against plotting against you, and in times of extreme distrust, keeping the nobles close at hand such that you can take decisive action against the individual noble before the forces they control can show up.
At each level of the hierarchy, recursively apply similar strategies. Nobels need to keep control of their knights, knights need to keep control of their peasants.
Except this tends to only get really "interesting" at the top. That's because the middle layers can call on their peers or even on their superiors in times of crisis. Hence peasant rebellions basically never succeed, since their aristocrats will simply apply to the king or to their peers to help them crush it.
But the king has no superiors and even his peers are not quite as much available, so the politicking at that level gets much less stable.
The first reason it’s not more common is that wealth isn’t so static. Landlords have to collect rents, oligarchs have to skim off the top of their corrupt enterprises etc. A guard who kills the landlord, then manages to organize rent collection for the benefit of other guards, has essentially become the new landlord.
The second reason is that a guard doesn’t just have to kill the landlord, a guard potentially has to kill all the other guards who want all the landlord’s wealth for themselves.
Since rent has to be collected anyway, and an individual guard has a low chance of surviving against all other guards, remaining a guard is a lower risk option.
>What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?
This does happen but yes obviously attempts are made to prevent it, the guards my not be familiar with the journey, other guards may be family members or trusted friends. Often then the guards become the Merchant then.
You see this with the billionaires building luxury apocalypse bunkers in New Zealand and other exotic locales that are like mini theme parks. It slowly dawns on them that when society breaks down that's exactly what it means. You can't depend on normal social norms or laws anymore, how do you stop your security team from kicking you out of your own bunker, how you do you charter a flight to your bunker? It's a problem with no guaranteed solution.
Prepping is different as it doesn't involve depending on others. Just yourself and your preparations.
Why beat someone where some negative consequences are likely to follow, if the same person can give you immunity to infinitely beat and extort large group of people only for your pleasure and at your whim? This is called society.
The answer is really what power is: people willing to do something for you. This very much did happen multiple times in history what you describe. A legion of roman soldiers uplifting their general to the status of emperor and marching on rome is a common theme in history. Mob bosses realizing they have enough support from other capos to take out the don and run the operation. Maybe that holds up, maybe that doesn't. Power is sometimes quite loosely held in history. There are people who claimed title of Emperor of Rome for less than a month. It can very much be like a game of Juggernaught in Halo.
It has happened a few times in history, e.g. the French revolution and the Bolshevik revolution.
However once they killed the "elite" or "oppressor" they couldn't stop the killing, and kept redefining who the "oppressor" was, until it was anyone who had one more cow than the rest.
The answer is easy: The others did the work. Until the party was over and the money spent. The more interesting question is: why has so much from the Victorian era survived in Britain to this day, whilst it disappeared in most other countries?
The article doesn't also quite give the numbers to say how effective they actually were. By modern standards the amount of people actually governing the empire was tiny. For instance the colonial office (the bit in London that administered the colonies centrally) had 14 staff in 1816, and grew to about 25 by 1850 [1]. The total colonial service including most overseas posts (except India and a few others) was about 1000 people by 1900, the Indian civil service was never more than ~1200. This over an empire of ~450 million subjects.
By contrast today's Civil service is about 550,000 governing a population of 69 million [3]. Of course it must be pointed out that todays government does more things for better or worse, so it's not saying they did the same with a few orders of magnitude fewer people. But still, seems pretty effective to me.
[1]: Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815–1830: "At the Colonial Office in 1816, there was a tiny establishment of 14: the Secretary of State, Earl Bathurst, his Under Secretary, Henry Goulburn, MP, the Permanent Secretary, a librarian, a translator and nine clerks. According to Goulburn, 'several' of the clerks were employed on slavery-law enforcement duties all the time. The enforcement of the antislavery law seems to have had priority over any other policy objective."
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Service
[3]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/civil-service-stati...
For instance the colonial office (the bit in London that administered the colonies centrally) had 14 staff in 1816, and grew to about 25 by 1850
Important context:
1. The Colonial Service never administered India, the biggest colony.
2. Lot of these colonies had representative institutions of their own. "We have 43 colonies, and not 50, 60, or 70, as has been variously stated; 27 of these have representative institutions, some in a higher degree of perfection than others, no doubt, but the whole have representative institutions, including Canada, New Brunswick, Jamaica, Antigua, Barbadoes, and all the minor West Indian colonies." [0]
[0]: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1849-04-16/debates/807...
> 1. The Colonial Service never administered India, the biggest colony.
And by that point the East India Company had one of the largest armies on earth.
It wasn’t that their administration was effective, it just didn’t care what happened as long as the plunder rolled in. It was backed by the largest Navy in the world and largest private army, which allowed it to devolve most functions to local puppets which implemented them brutally (and why the EIC was eventually nationalized). For example the Mughal bureaucracy alone was massive and they just coopted it, as long as they had the means to physically enforce their control.
The proximate cause of nationalization of EIC was the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.
It doesn't take that many people to perform rent extraction -- you can have an entire country run by one absentee landlord so long as you can pay the local police to maintain order for you. Obviously the counterfactual is not available to us, but the colonial administration presided over the deaths of tens of millions due to disease and famine. Some of that is unavoidable tragedy, but quite a lot of it is direct mismanagement (especially fervent devotion to a "work sets you free" mindset and free market capitalism).
> so long as you can pay the local police to maintain order for you
If you don't count the people doing the work, it indeed looks like you don't need as many people to do the work.
In your scenario order and rent extraction is not being maintained by an absentee landlord at all then.
We are indeed not counting the people doing the work. The colonial office does not include the actual administration of the country, that is kind of the whole point of my comment.
I apologize for misreading your comment then.
I am in the process of reading the volume on India for the Oxford History of the British Empire.
In early modern academia, "Historia" was defined as opposed to "Philosophia" as being the study of the particular versus that of generalizations.
One thing that my experience in studying history at a major European university showed me is that almost any generalization one makes about any period in history can be disproved. There is a lot of complexity in the development of path dependent evolution and irreversible processes that simply cannot be compressed and modeled.
That's comparable to the Victorian elites' situation, where they only count people directly employed by the home office, and ignore the so called independent colonial administration as if it's a completely different category of human.
Are they not also Victorian Elites, or did they lose that status by not being in Britain?
Above we are counting them. This about ~10000 people total, most of them abroad. We are not counting military since these are civil servants, but neither are we counting military today.
I feel like not counting the military is silly in that case, because the military in colonies was essentially involved in police actions, engineering duties, and ensuring administrative rules were followed.
As an essential part of the colony, you can't really count them out. That's similar to how in feudal structures, and military regimes, I'd count the military and civil service as one entity.
>Some of that is unavoidable tragedy, but quite a lot of it is direct mismanagement (especially fervent devotion to a "work sets you free" mindset and free market capitalism).
It was all going so well until you spewed propaganda, believe it not the provinces administered by the British were least affected by disease and famine primarily because of the infrastructure and institutions that'd been established in them. Additionally, we have a better insight into those regions because of the record keeping again introduced by the bureaucracy forced upon them...
You just have to look at past colonies today in india to still see the positive impact they had. To this very day all proper and impressive buildings are the ones build back then, sadly they are all slowly falling apart because of lack of care and maintenance by the locals.
But you also have the thing like the East India Company which is essentially a government by itself.
The size of any given bureaucracy has little to do with the work load as demonstrated by Parkinson in the 1950s.
Ruling in the 1800s when firearms were orders of magnitude more expensive than today was an entirely different game than doing so in a world of mass consumption.
Divide and conquer in a world where the pony express is the fastest channel and telegraphs were the almost exclusive to the banking system and selected government agencies was still possible. Now high school students can coordinate nationally via social media. Look at the consequences of Arab spring 2011 still reverberating.
In a way, Victorian elites were much more effective relative the the helplessness of civil society at a time when people would be counted as highly mobile if they had a bicycle and could routinely travel to a few more villages than their grand parents had ever seen in their lifetimes.
The Victorian era, 1837-1901 roughly overlapped the rail era - first railway 1804 in Cornwall, "railway mania" 1840s which was a railway stock bubble and crash.
>The mania reached its zenith in 1846, when 263 Acts of Parliament for setting up new railway companies were passed, with the proposed routes totalling 9,500 miles (15,300 km). About a third of the railways authorised were never built...
Somewhat reminiscent of our current AI boom. At least the Victorian one seemed to lead on to prosperity so fingers crossed.
Prosperity for who? Not for the colonies.
The greatest feat of the ruthless British empire was the great number of independency holidays around the world.
I'm not that up on the details but a lot of the former British empire like the US, Canada, Australia etc. are doing quite well. I was in Hong Kong in the 1980s and it did much better then under UK government than the mainland. Not sure about places like India. Ireland wasn't that great.
Singapore and even India too.
It’s complicated, because while yes the British were bastards, unlike some of the powers they weren’t completely rapacious, and recognized that at least a modicum of self sufficiency and good governance was necessary for them to have something to steal long term.
The French, Spanish, or (big yikes) Belgian colonies have had significantly harder times.
Kind of a ‘what did the Roman’s ever do for us?’ situation.
I get the impression a lot of the success was just providing some sort of rule of law and military security and then letting markets do their thing along the lines of Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market. (Scot who did some study at Oxford and died in 1790).
The old British Empire was hardly a an exemplar of free market economics. There were many independent companies but there were also chartered monopolies and price controls. We take basic economics for granted today but back then many leaders literally didn't understand the basics of how it worked.
Many people don’t realise that Adam Smith’s most famous work was a criticism of the prevailing economic policies of the era.
Sounds like at least a modicum of good governance to me.
The approach from most of the others (especially Belgian) more closely resembled strip mining.
The government that governs best governs least.
> Ireland wasn't that great.
A lack of resources useful to industry didn’t help. The industrial revolution didn’t benefit everyone equally.
Seems like an accurate picture of the Victorian elite, but it sounds like they were optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked. That was success "on their own terms," as the article puts it, but not something to emulate.
Depends who you mean by the elite.
The aristocracy, certainly.
The upper middle class (i.e. professional class - I know other countries define these things differently) that provided the administrators were just good at their jobs and worked hard. Leonard Woolf's autobiography is a great insider view. Histories of the period too.
The upper middle class were decidedly not elite at that time and very much "working class plus"
Still are, arguably. Dependent on earnings rather than wealth.
They did have a lot of privileges, especially when employed in the colonies.
I think we are entering a wierd era where a huge population (baby boomers) are returing with incredible passive wealth compared to any other working class era in history.
This is... a mass elite or more of one that may have ever existed before including the small merchant class of the late 1800s
Baby boomers are aged between 66 and 80, so most of them have already retired. We are not entering the era, we are in it.
And though some are quite wealthy, the average Boomer net worth of about $1.6MM is concentrated in the wealthy top few, like any other demographic. The median Boomer has a net worth of $300-$400K, the largest fraction of which is probably their house (so not income-producing), and that isn't really a lot to live off of in 2026.
While the house isn't producing, it is expense reducing, and that works out to be the same thing. Assuming that the house is paid for, of course, if your net worth is really only $300K, odds are you don't have the house paid for either: social Security is the bulk of your income, which, it's enough to live on, but it isn't a life of luxury.
> Assuming that the house is paid for, of course, if your net worth is really only $300K, odds are you don't have the house paid for either
I don't understand, is it paid for or not?
The insight comes when you consider each and what they mean. That is imagine two people with a net worth of $300k.
Person A has a paid off house. If their net worth is 300k that implies a low cost of living area, and a small house. They likely are used to living a modest life (most people when given more money will spend it on a better house). They won't need much money, and better yet, since their house is paid for, they don't have to pay rent with their income. Of course it is entirely possible they are "party animals" who never are home and only need a tiny house for an address, and they spent every penny they earn on alcohol for their 'friends' - but this seems unlikely.
Person B doesn't have their house paid off (living in an apartment counts!), and their net worth is 300k. The question then becomes how much are they paying for housing every month, since this reduces their spending ability.
Neither person will have a great life (assuming they live in the US - 300k net worth in a poor country is considerable wealth), but a paid off house allows for a nice life, while paying for the house means scrapping by.
Thank you blu. Would you go so far as to say that the current system is designed to discourage the existence of a Person A (or at least the non-party animal Person A) since they are not consuming as much?
No. There is not "the system" as a single unique identity. Different parts have different motivations. Some parts do discourage A, but other parts encourage it. Most don't care. Same with B - they are different parts, but they get all sides.
Missing a semicolon there, I think:
"Assuming that the house is paid for, of course; if your net worth is really only $300K, odds are you don't have the house paid for either"
Moderns who are accustomed to typical homeownership arrangements do not even realize how different this world is from feudal times and manor houses in the UK. If we transplanted a medieval feudal lord or serf to 2026, they would be appalled and shocked at how wasteful our land-use is.
I have contemplated this, especially in terms of universal suffrage, where we've progressed from a male landowner with voting rights, to anyone over 18. And I've also come to find out that there are many, many homeowners today who flout zoning, insurance, and business licensing to run "cottage industries" in SFH-zoned areas, and these are often sources of clash with the HOA.
It's been mentioned on HN before how the "front lawn" and ornamental gardens are implicitly conspicuous consumption. They boast, "I own land and I can waste all this space on non-farmland! I am wealthy enough to feed my family without growing my own!" Because in feudal days, in the manor house, your estate and your land were really expected to produce revenue! The lord of a manor was duty-bound to hire a cadre of servants to care for the home and family, and hire or sublet to farmers and shepherds and others who would exploit the land. The estates, the convents and monasteries, the farmlands, the Southern plantations, these were all implicitly revenue-producing, not merely where someone lived, and then rode a horse to their office somewhere else in a different "zone". That would've been absurdly wasteful...
So today, there are people secretly painting sneakers, or selling firearms, or running a family farm to sell raw milk and mutton, or doing mani-pedis, or selling tee shirts, from their residential-zoned McMansions or even apartments. But typically a SFH, where in 2026, we've decided that if we're investing a cool million in property, it would indeed be wasteful not to exploit that, even if we need to do it on the D.L., and fight endlessly with the HOA and code inspectors, who are gonna say we need to rent office space.
The obvious difference between then and now is intensive agriculture. In modern times, we don't need as much farmland per capita. I hate seeing productive farmland developed into mcmansions as much as anyone. But, the market values the mcmansions more.
Latifundia would have been a known concept to the historic peoples mentioned by GP and the ones GP is talking about purposefully rejected the practice. Local, small agriculture was a key aspect of culture and political power, insofar as the power to feed is the power to deny food.
In some countries, imputed rent used to be taxable income. If you owned your home, you basically calculated the market rent for a similar home, subtracted your expenses, and paid taxes for the rest. It was one of those policies economists considered justified (because it made the choice between owning and renting tax neutral) but the general public didn't.
Those times are gone, but the theoretical justification that makes homes income-producting assets remains.
Sounds sensible. In my country (and probably many others), if you and your neighbour own identical houses or apartments and have identical mortgages, and instead of living in your own one you rent the neighbours one and live in that and vice versa, then you can both offset your mortgage interest against the rental income and both be better off than if you lived in your own house.
If it’s better for you and your neighbor to switch houses and rent from each other the system is broken.
I accept the premise on the math, but "better off" is subjective. I'm in the UK so that's my context.
When your renter informs you of the boiler breaking, or a roof needs replacing, that's going to get thorny - "It was fine when I was using it/living in it, did you break it?"
Perhaps the latest round of updates to property law for renters come along and suddenly as a landlord you have to above and beyond what you need to as an owner; you both have to do X, Y or Z to your properties because they're rental and not a basic owner situation.
If you’ve got a paid-off house, some savings, social security or a pension, and only another 10-20 years to live then you’re far better off than many Americans.
This basically. I doubt the generations after the boomers will have it as good in retirement, especially with the price of housing right now.
>so not income-producing
Depends on what you consider a reverse mortgage/equity loan they plan to die before paying.
I think that varies in availability depending on country.
Sweden is pretty hard on mortgages/loans to people who are retired, know problem for some actually.
Reverse mortgage FTW! I say in jest because this can be a good structure, it's often associated with shady business practices.
There is a gov't web page about this product: https://www.hud.gov/hud-partners/single-family-hecmhome
That page has a telephone hotline that people can call to get advice, including help to find a reliable broker. Probably the biggest problem with (honest) reverse mortgages is that they can run out of money before you die. You can continue to stay in your house, but you probably immediately fall into extreme poverty.
Roughly 1/3 of Boomers also have private pensions (remember those from before the 2000s?). Social Security is about 25K USD per year. It is expected to only cover 40% of living costs. It is scary how many retired Americans live only from Social Security in their retirement.
don't forget the 2.5 children in the stats prattle
> The median Boomer has a net worth of $300-$400K, the largest fraction of which is probably their house (so not income-producing)
What? Do you not live in your house?
You do, but even if it's paid for, you still have to pay taxes, insurance, and maintenance on it. It's likely better than renting in most cases, but it's not a free place to live.
It's still an income-producing asset. It produces quite a lot of income. You have to pay for maintenance on everything, but that doesn't mean that income-producing assets don't exist.
Living in a house is not income.
It's imputed income because you don't have to pay rent.
This is the most European thing I’ve read all week. Income is inflow of money, while rent is an expense. The avoidance of expense should not be considered income for tax purposes: it would discourage frugality.
If you applied that principle consistently, it would be much worse to tax income, since that discourages production.
No, that's just a measurement methodology. It's income because it's a valuable product that you receive.
Consider a farm that grows wheat on 15 acres of fields. Are those fields an income-producing asset? If so, your house is also an income-producing asset.
Very true. And the way things are going, just in the English-speaking countries, United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, those between 18 and 40 are having more trouble buying that house or condo.
Those luxury apartments are going up everywhere, at least in the United States. $2200 a month with amenities for a one bedroom studio.
Because boomers were imbued with love for centralized solutions by their greatest generation parents without really understand the "this isn't a magic wand" side of the coin. And so they went on and regulated the living crap out of where and what kind of housing (everything really) can be built so the only way to make a project still have a "someone will finance this" profit margin after all the getting kicked in the dick by regulatory hoops you gotta do is to build a lot of units hence the proliferation of luxury condos and tract home/townhouse developments.
Come on. There are plenty of places in the USA where you can rent a small apartment for less than $2200. Try Cleveland.
The baby boom happened in some countries at different times. In the US from 1946 till 1965, in Germany 1955-1969. In Japan fertility dropped after 1973
Irelands wasn't until the early 2000's.
On other social media platforms, the boomers are aged 28 to 107. And I'm not exaggerating, you can check for yourself. The muddying of definitions is the root of all evil.
The age range of baby boomers is not seriously in question no matter what some internet random on social may say. At most it's a little fuzzy around the edges, but Wikipedia's range of 1946 and 1964 seems on the mark.
There are also loyalty to the system built by thema affiliated cohorts.
>The age range of baby boomers is not seriously in question no matter what some internet random on social may say.
Tell them that, not me. We live in a descriptivist universe.
I'm reminded of a cartoon with an old hippy holding a sign saying "Never trust anyone over 30"....
.... with the 30 crossed out and repalced by 40, which is crossed out and replaced by 50, which is..... you get the idea.
The young calling anybody over 28 'boomer' is the modern equivalent of this :-)
The phrase "boomer is a state of mind, not an age" comes to mind.
Ok Boomer
Wild random insults don't change the definition
s/elite/owners/g
You can’t have a bourgeoisie without a mass of petit-bourgeoisie making sure no proletariat ever forgets their class
Rent seeking how? As the article says, most government positions were unpaid and to be an MP required paying all your own election expenses out of pocket, which were huge. They did it for the prestige and social rewards, not financial. Landowners were expected to take on government roles, also for free.
I know! How could these literal landlords be rent-seeking by taking unpaid positions of political influence to increase literal rental income and protect their wealth?
Until the 1830s the British elections at least were openly corrupt, the system of 'Rotten Boroughs' meant the makeup of Parliament was still essentially mediaeval into the early industrial era. You had absolutely mad situations where Manchester sent nobody to Parliament, but an old village which had literally fallen into the sea long before still sent two MPs.
Fascinatingly bizarre. More info: https://ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/features/rotten-boroughs/
See also Potwallopers for further historical weirdness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potwalloper
Its rent seeking because they’re using the government role to bring in the dough for themselves after they get the role. It just takes a bit of money upfront similar to a landlord buying a house. That’s also how you restrict government roles to the rich who only use it for personal gain. Similar to people who believe that Trump is generously by “donating” his salary back but not realizing that he and his family are earning far more in bribes and kickbacks using his position.
You're asserting a lot of things that aren't in the article. If you want to argue Victorian-era MPs were all motivated by corruption then go ahead but you'll need to cite strong evidence for that, because the general consensus was that MPs of that time were not particularly corrupt. As the article says, they didn't even spend much time on lawmaking at all, so there wasn't a lot of legislation to abuse.
The pre-Victorian system was known as the "Old Corruption" (capitalized), so while it was less so there was still quite a high baseline.
https://historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/old-corrup...
It's not asserting corruption. they were the voluntary caretakers of a system designed to ensure their prosperity and they provided their time and energy so that the system would continue to do so.
The system was already set-up to their maximum benefit. Their corruption was in making sure nothing changed, no matter the clamoring of the vast majority.
The problem is the counter-examples. We have dysfunctional cleptocracies worldwide. They go nowhere. Last of all, they do not conquer- and transfer there money outside towards high-trust societies. Thus by the empire they conquered- they can not have been as corrupt as the others. If the machine you build kills it- you can not have eaten that machine faster than it produces pocket butter.
Someone’s never heard of regulatory capture
And to get a promotion in the army you had to buy it.
I don't know why this was downvoted, the practice of purchasing commissions in the army was only abolished halfway through Victoria's reign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...
"The Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent."
-- Karl Marx
> Landowners were expected to take on government roles, also for free
This was just the dying embers of feudalism. Which is still theoretically present in England, having been abolished in Scotland in the year 2000.
Careful, that's some of that stuff that they teach in humanities and classics courses. You know, what is being labeled as wasteful or impractical in this thread.
I believe Victorian wealth disparity was on par with today's in America -- perhaps America has slightly more "power law" wealth at the very top of the percentage charts -- but for those in charge of new empires, maybe this article will be very useful and remind them it's better to go party in SF than it is to put in too much time in the office.
Not in the least. Today in the US less than 1% of the population works as home service. In victorian England it was around 10%.
The US is a powerful "empire", but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.
As the variably attributed proverb goes, "The sun never sets on the British Empire, because God doesn't trust the English in the dark"
It's certainly now well intent into making sure it'll never rise again.
The chinese openly want to rebuild their version of the british empire. Its in almost all of their adds if you know how to look for the message
I'm not sure that demonstrates anything. That just demonstrates that people work different jobs than they did back then; it doesn't tell us anything about wealth distribution.
21% of US jobs are service occupations. All you've really done is establish that cars exist so the wealthy have deemed it no longer necessary to allow filthy peasants to live in their mansions.
“I never thought I would be so rich as to be able to own a car, but I did become rich — so rich that in the end I could give up working if I liked. That was a great surprise to me.
But at the same time, it was the irony of life that while I could afford a car, I could not afford a maid."
- Agatha Christie
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says:
The BLS has two "service" definitions. The 80% figure includes almost literally everything that isn't producing physical goods, including doctors, lawyers, professors, and software developers. The 21% figure is the BLS's "service occupations" subgrouping that you would consider more traditional service work - preparing and serving food and drink, cleaning, hired guards, etc.
Nowadays service jobs are externalized. Try to compare how big chunk of the population are in service industries now and then.
Back then they had a private coachman and now you have an independent contractor with the Uber app.
We've always have public coachmen and public bars and restaurants. The fact that there are many more now only means a lot more people can afford them.
> the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed
the word "powerful" isn't really a great choice, because no empire has had the reach of ability as the USA. The USA also used soft power much more effectively, even if the UK reigned over more people.
Per capita largest, maybe? At one point, 1/4 in people in the world were UK subjects.
> The USA also used soft power much more effectively,
Good god!
I genuinely choked on a mouthfull of tea reading this!
Almost nobody works in "home service"
But I can get a cleaner twice a week, grab an Uber whenever I want to drive me wherever I want, have professional chefs cook for me every evening via food delivery services, etc etc
That's an unusual measure -- and I like it. I wonder what those percentages are in very wealthy communities in America, e.g. Greenwich and surroundings, Nantucket, Hamptons plus labor communities west.
what a strange rebuttal to the observably true fact that wealth disparity today is very similar to victorian and french revolution times, as the parent was saying.
Regarding French Revolution times, I found a good source to confirm your assertion: "Is Wealth Inequality Today as Bad as in Pre-Revolutionary France?"[1] That blog post uses various peer-reviewed academic sources from researchers that calculated pre-industrial (historical) Gini coefficient for different nations.
From that same blog post, they mentioned an excellent data source: "The World Inequality Database". Check this link[2] to compare historical "Top 1% net personal wealth share" for USA vs France vs UK. Hint: After the page loads, you need to drag the green slider at the bottom of the chart to the far left. Then you can see back to 1800. It is wild how unequal Victorian Britan was compared to anything today: Top 1% owned 68% of wealth!
[1] https://populareconomics.substack.com/p/is-wealth-inequality...
[2] https://wid.world/world/#shweal_p99p100_z/US;FR;WO-PPP;GB/la...
>but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.
Interesting to see this popular myth still being regurgitated when someone as perceptive as Bertrand Russell who lived through part of it admitted it was self-aggrandizing propaganda. In truth 80% of the British "Empire" were impoverished Indians. While back at home the Blue Books were churning out shocking reports of the misery and physical state of the British working class compared to their American and European peers. Read the archives from the early 20th century for a real eye-opener. And to top it all off, the "rule the waves" trope when Britain lost the Battle of the Chesapeake, aka the one naval battle that truly mattered in its history.
I wouldn't say the UK is now, but was the most powerful empire to have existed. What else would you call a nation that 65 nations have claimed independence from? They can't claim independence if they weren't once part of the empire.
At the risk of repeating myself, those 65 nations were comprised of 80% impoverished Indians who struggled with decades of recurring famines. Power was being defined on the European continent through much of the 19th century and 20th century. See the intro to "The Grand Chessboard" where the author expounds on the idea that only Napoleonic France and the US came close to world hegemony, as well as my other replies in this thread.
> And to top it all off, the "rule the waves" trope when Britain lost the Battle of the Chesapeake, aka the one naval battle that truly mattered in its history.
With all due respect, this is Americentric nonsense. If you had to rank the most important British naval battles obviously Trafalgar is at the top. The Nile, Jutland, and even arguably the Armada campaign are also much more important.
A British loss at Trafalgar would not have prevented the Prussians from tipping the scale in favor of the anti-Napoleonic coalition at Waterloo ten years later. And for good reason: continental Europe was the center of world power, the main chessboard where it was measured and exercised, not overseas backwater where naval blockades could only go so far. And I'm only paraphrasing Brzezinski's famous book here.
I wonder whether you are wrong for the same reason that the people are wrong who say the main chessboard in WWII was the area between the Rhine and the Volga. It ignores the high toll imposed on Germany by its being extremely restricted for most of the war in its ability to ship anything (and to receive shipments initiated by non-German entrepreneurs) while the allies were much less restricted so that for example the Soviets fighting on this "main chessboard" had supplies flowing in from Murmansk, Vladivostok and the Persian Corridor through Iran. IIRC the value of these supplies in 2026 dollars is about a trillion dollars (largely paid for by London and Washington).
Sorry but this reply is too oblique for me to provide a constructive rebuttal. Fact of the matter is, Russia was the beginning of the end for Napoleon whose fate was sealed through a series of timeline-altering strategic blunders that more ample supply chains would not have remedied.
In which European countries were wages higher than in Britain? In which countries were the living conditions so much higher than in Britain in that period? That Britain ruled India and India was poor is no secret but that also doesn’t mean they weren’t powerful.
Also regarding Chesapeake, Britain’s century of hegemony came afterwards. Trafalgar came afterwards, and mattered a lot. Losing that battle doesn’t mean the navy wasn’t globally dominant in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
What’s the Bertrand Russell quote?
You can list a long series of reasons why they were weak and crap, ackshually. But presumably plenty about them was also not weak and crap otherwise they wouldn’t have ended up the global hegemon for a century. Certainly in terms of global trade dominance, at their peak nobody in history has come close, not China and not the USA.
Forgot to add:
>Britain's century of hegemony came afterwards
Another popular misuse of the term hegemony that's in line with the retrospective aggrandizement I mentioned earlier. It suits the monolithic power held by some ancient Greek city-states over their neighbors (whether economic, military or cultural), but not the power and influence Britain had to share with France through much of the the 19th century in the colonial world.
You can find evidence for this flawed retrospection in the modern and recurring (mis)characterizations of former British influence. For example, the alleged dominance of the British Pound among central banks (when in reality most international transactions were still settled in bullions, while half the world was effectively using the French-based LMU); its predominant role in abolishing slavery through prosecution of slave-ships (which hardly affected the US and was only accomplished with the willing participation of the French Republic); its central role in the dissemination of cultural and scientific publications (despite surveys showing that in 1870 French was by far the dominant language for global publications in agriculture, applied sciences, commerce, industry and technology). Remember that it was post-WW1 America that helped English replace French as the lingua franca, not the UK. There's a reason Disraeli was still speaking in French with Russian diplomats in 1877. That's not what a "world hegemon" does, and using such exaggerations does a serious disservice to history.
>What’s the Bertrand Russell quote?
From memory, it was something about the English belief that their naval supremacy was like "a law of nature", only to have it shattered in one day by a country with little naval history (Germany). Together with the equally short-lived delusion that "the whole world would become exactly like England".
And I don't know why you chose such a misleading metric as wages rather than actual living standards of the British working class as late as 1919. From McClure's Magazine:
>Every European visitor who has traveled through the United States has commented upon the stature of men and women in our factory towns as opposed to the factory classes in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds. The Blue Book Reports of the British Parliament have stressed the number of British working men with dwarfed physique. Investigation shows an abnormal number of young men whose optic nerve was so imperfect they could not see the sights of a rifle; whose auditory nerve was weak; whose vital force was not sufficient to develop enamel upon the teeth; whose heart action was feeble and whose respiration was sub-normal. British students find the explanation in dark tenements, insufficient food, want of playgrounds where boys and girls could excercise and build their bodies, in child labor, in pregnant women who worked up to within a month of their confinement.
Yes, the bad teeth stereotype might be a living residual of these severe deficiencies (you can still see it in many parts of post-USSR Eastern Europe as well). And before you claim it was any better in the 19th century, know that there's an entire scholarly field devoted to the miseries of the Victorian proletariat.
The truth is, Britain simply did not have the wealth to accommodate its population tripling in size in the span of a few decades. You can still get a sense of this struggling working class feel today by walking through just about any English town and looking at its endless rows of compact, gloomy-looking houses and people.
> physical state of the British working class compared to their American and European peers
Probably not European, British workers were very well paid by continental standards (cost of living was higher though). If you want an example of pure exploitative capitalism where workers were reduced to near serfdom there is Belgium.
>British workers were very well paid by continental standards
See my reply to jjtwixman above which rebukes this misleading metric. In fact, the cited account is particularly telling in that it is made in comparison to continental standards.
That appears anecdotal? Real wages for unskilled urban workers around 1900 in Britain were higher than in pretty much any other European country. An average worker in England worked less hours and made more money than their equivalent in France and Germany. Only Denmark, Sweden and Ireland were somewhat close.
These British Blue Books reports were based on country-wide surveys conducted for the Parliament and as such were anything but anectodal. I specifically quoted an American magazine to emphasize how visible this misery was even to a foreign observer. In the case at hand, they surveyed some of the most populated English factory towns which your "average worker" would have called home. Not the "slums of Victorian cities", to quote historian Sheridan Wayne Gilley, where life was even harder for the "half-heathen multitudes of the Victorian urban poor". Just those average workers which had been "herded into factories and workshops, subjected to industrial regulation, and denied the fullest political freedoms". You get the picture.
Well… I’m not arguing that the conditions weren’t terrible just that they were better than in most continental countries. US of course was on another level (yet there was plenty of squalor there as well)
Are you claiming that the Battle of Trafalgar didn't matter?
The Royal Navy indeed won many battles "that mattered". Saying that Chesapeake is the only one is just ridiculously ahistorical.
See my reply to BoxOfRain above. The grand chessboard was continental Europe. Britain and its sub 10 million people was a naval nuisance that would not have fundamentally altered Napoleon's self-sabotage on the continent. He called it a "nation of shopkeepers" for a reason.
Chesapeake, on the other hand, sealed the birth of a world-changing nation.
[dead]
Ultimatly, the new-comer empires got the old warhorse in such a fight, it had to give up the empire- and the us wisely kept out of that classic extractive empire buisness, supporting free trade to placate all those sandwiched late-comer nation as empires going hyperactive.
So in a way, germany got its wish- the french and british empire where no more after 2 world wars.
Germany didn’t want to destroy the British and French empires. They wanted continental domination and their “place in the sun”. Germany remains central to Europe as is unavoidable but it’s not dominating the continent in the way either the Kaiserreich or the third Reich wanted.
Incidentally there was no greater period of free trade in human history than under British hegemony. Even the US has not pursued unilateral free trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Liberalism
India had a whole thing about that freedom of trade. The wheel in the flag is a symbol of not wanting to participate in that sort of free trade the british empire offered.
> they were optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked.
If you go through history, it's hard to find a king that is not like that. The only difference is that some kings (and nowadays: presidents) are better at keeping a clean public image, see The Prince by Machiavelli for details.
> optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked
I wonder if we could see the American elite the same way? Private schools, then greek houses (fraternities) on campuses. Fraternities seem like they are continuing the victorian elite education, focus on long lasting connections between them.
I don’t think that’s a helpful explanation. This period was the age of empires. Why were the Victorian elites so much more successful at it than their counterparts?
One way of thinking about it, the success of the elite (meaning the aristocracy) may be separate from the success of the empire. Most of the work behind the latter was done by the industrial bourgeoisie, engineers, workers, colonized people, etc., so the question is, how big a direct impact did the elite have on the empire? How successful they were individually is a different question.
In most corporations, most of the work is not done by the CEO. Yet a good or bad CEO can still have a big impact.
True, but not universally, depending on whether they are involved day-to-day management or just acting as a public face to the org. Of course there's always just being in the right place at the right time. So I think it's worth looking at the specific decisions, policies, culture, etc.
This whole article is not about the aristocracy.
I guess the author doesn't cleanly define "elite", but it does lean heavy on the upper-class, and the depiction of social life seems to suggest that as well. But I guess during that period the makeup of upper-class shifted a bit from entirely aristocrats / nobility to include others too
They had a more technologically advanced society than anyone else at the time, which enabled their empire building.
The Industrial Revolution started in England, which gave them a technological leg up on everyone else, somewhat like playing a strategy game where you get to unlock certain techs before everyone else. If you have factories producing steamships while your opponents are still building sailboats by hand, you're probably going to win a naval conflict, which you can then use to start a colony.
The first rule of success is to own your definition of success.
Is there a form of (self-)success that manifests when you accomplish what other people and only other people wanted you to accomplish? That'd be their success, not yours.
What if you fell into it by accident? I fell into it because I like computers. and the design department I worked in at the time. started an investment club.
You will fall out of it just as easily
The "picture" doesn't seem accurate. If they were feasting so much, then why didn't they go obese?
Because they did not put sugar in everything. Also, they weren't cooking with vegetable oils.
Without those two it's a bit difficult to get to the point of obesity in a world where you have to walk a lot because cars and elevators don't exist.
Correction: they did put sugar in absolutely everything. Vast quantities of it. Read up on Demerara sometime.
That leaves vegetable oils, and cars. I think it's like 70/30 personally.
But they drank a lot of alcohol ...
Looking at pictures of Churchill, who was admittedly a bit after the Victorians but seems to have followed a somewhat similar lifestyle, he doesn't exactly strike me as skinny.
I imagine they did have a fair amount of obesity in the older members of the population, although it's also possible that the sportier ones (which I'm guess would have entailed things like polo and horseback riding) would remain fit into old age.
Walking everywhere. Mass obesity (there's always been a few obese people among elites everywhere!) is a product of the motorcar.
Also, food unevenly distributed across the day. Any one individual probably wouldn't have a large breakfast and elevenses and a large lunch and afternoon tea and a large dinner, on every single day. Even if you can find examples of each of those separately.
mass obesity is a product of people eating unhealthy. i have access to plenty of luxuries compared to the rest of the world, and even America, yet my BMI is about ~20. individuals are responsible for being fat.
If by individuals you mean the individuals stocking the supermarkets with ultraprocessed foods, maybe.
The timing doesn't work. In the US, obesity didn't start taking off until the 1970s and 1980s, and the motorcar was ubiquitous long before that.
there's nothing wrong with indirect rule, everyone benefitted in the long run.
you put the finger on it. And meanwhile the children were being worked to death in work houses.
Isn't it exactly how the tech industry largely operates today?
I question this framing:
> Caricaturing a little, we can distinguish two groups in modern educational debates: traditionalists and progressives. Traditionalists think that education should prioritize acquiring knowledge, that it should focus on ‘hard’ subjects like science, mathematics, and foreign languages, and that it should take place in a highly structured environment, where students’ time and behavior are tightly regulated. Progressives think that education should prioritize acquiring skills, that it should embrace ‘soft’ subjects beyond the supposed academic core, and that students should be given wide freedom in which to develop personally and socially.
Today's proponents of "classical education", whom I would categorize as quite conservative, sound like the supposed progressives described above, preferring to teach students how to learn.
From Dorothy L. Sayers' essay "The Lost Tools of Learning":
> What, then, are we to do? We cannot go back to the Middle Ages. That is a cry to which we have become accustomed. We cannot go back -- or can we?
> Is the Trivium [1], then, a sufficient education for life? Properly taught, I believe that it should be. At the end of the Dialectic, the children will probably seem to be far behind their coevals brought up on old-fashioned "modern" methods, so far as detailed knowledge of specific subjects is concerned. But after the age of fourteen they should be able to overhaul the others hand over fist. Indeed, I am not at all sure that a pupil thoroughly proficient in the Trivium would not be fit to proceed immediately to the university at the age of sixteen, thus proving himself the equal of his mediæval counterpart, whose precocity often appears to us so astonishing and unaccountable.
[1] Grammar -> Logic / Dialectic -> Rhetoric
https://www.pccs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/LostToolsOfL...
On the last supposition: they've managed something better for themselves, which is an order where they have substantial control over public policy without being subject to the full brunt of public inquiry or responsibility. You would have to force Sam Altman to run for office; Oprah famously laughs when questioned about pursuing the presidency.
The article tries to imply this system 'worked', but Britain alreadt had an intercontinental colonial empire for 150 years prior to the Victorian era. Massive technological and scientific advances like the steam engine and calculus preceded the Victorian era. The hedonistic generation of leadership that came out of this era basically lost it all.
For better picture of what made Britain successful during this era look to folks like Isa Brunel... son of a French Revolutionary immigrant who was poor enough for debtors prison, but skilled enough in engineering and math to build some of the largest ships in the world.
> basically lost it all
Last week I worked up this one-liner: "Great Britain extracted the wealth of a vast empire, far less wealth than might have been created, pissed most of it away through bad domestic policy, and transferred the rest to the USA to pay for one-and-a-half world wars."
A failure to reinvest in domestic industrial tech; a painfully high-value currency; and low-mobility economic stratification. History does love its rhyming slams.
>>far less wealth than might have been created
Like the movie says, if they could have created wealth, they would have created wealth.
"They" = the colonies? They were prevented from creating wealth.
What about before the colonisers got there? Nothing prevented them then.
Technologies usually aren't invented in the same place at the same time.
Where and when this happens are often accidents or confluences of history and geography.
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... makes a very good argument that the Industrial Revolution could only have begun in England. (EDIT: I wrote "Europe" earlier)
In the medieval era travel and communication were slow enough that being behind on technology wasn't too bad because there was time to catch up before someone conquered you. In the modern era that was no longer the case. If you've ever played a historical strategy game you know what I'm talking about.
Additionally India and China were the wealthiest regions of the pre-industrial world. There's a reason Europeans went there instead of them going to Europe. They had things Europeans wanted, rather than the other way around.
India was already conquered by the Moguls by the time the British got there, so I guess they had to consolidate their own colonisation before looking to extend.
I mean maybe you could say the industrial revolution could only have happened in Britain, but that's awfully hard to prove. It also wasn't a pre-cursor to a lot of the empire.
> India was already conquered by the Moguls by the time the British got there
Like 200 years before that. India produced a quarter of the world's manufacturing output in 1750. [1] It was already prosperous when the British got there. That's why the British were there.
You're really going to tell me that if the British hadn't conquered them, they wouldn't have rapidly adopted the industrial revolution? Why not? Japan did.
> It also wasn't a pre-cursor to a lot of the empire
I don't know what that means. Britain's navy and army, as well as its advanced capital markets, were key to conquering so much of the world. Industrial capacity is fundamental to a strong navy and army in the modern world. Advanced capital markets generally develop to support industrial growth.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_Empire#Economy
China, India, and most of the Middle East had effectively been conquered by descendants of horseback quasi-nomadic peoples at the start of the British colonial era. The Qing Dynasty (Manchurians), the Mughals (descendants of Tamerlane and the Mongol aristocracy of Genghis Khan), and the Ottoman Turks (former vassals to the Mongolian Ilkhanate and also Tamerlane). It can be argued these Central Asian warlord societies were not conducive to technological development.
> It can be argued these Central Asian warlord societies were not conducive to technological development
Why not? Their technology is part of what helped them conquer so much in the first place. What would make them so hostile to technology?
All 3 societies were among the leading powers of the world up until the 1800s, in addition to being productive and prosperous.
It wasn't universally due to lack of interest in guns (although in the Qing case, they actually did pull back on the use of firearms due to how poorly both the Ming Dynasty and Dzungar Mongols fared with the matchlock weapons of that era against strategic deployment of Qing horseback archery). India had an enormous arms manufacturing industry that included usage of rocket artillery, Timur absolutely loved using cannons, Ottoman matchlocks were considered the best in the world and even exported to China from the 1500s onward.
It wasn't the lack of arms or interest in arms, it was the lack of development of the sciences which had to flow through the patronage of those in authority. Britain had Newton and Newton co-invented calculus. The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery and higher precision manufacturing that by the Victorian Era could not be matched by Chinese or Indian workshops. The wealthy gentleman scientist and natural philosopher culture that developed the galvanic pile, the pressure cooker, astronomical telescopes, and the microscope was not something that could develop organically in these Eastern countries due to the political makeup of these empires (largely driven by descendants of nomadic warlords)
> The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... See this for why the steam engine was invented where it was.
> The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery and higher precision manufacturing that by the Victorian Era could not be matched by Chinese or Indian workshops
By the Victorian Era India, at least, had substantially de-industrialized due to colonial policy.
> The wealthy gentleman scientist and natural philosopher culture that developed the galvanic pile, the pressure cooker, astronomical telescopes, and the microscope was not something that could develop organically in these Eastern countries
Why did they have to develop them organically? Europeans didn't invent gunpowder or algebra or the counting system.
I think Bill Bryson writes about this much better than I can, but in short, European political fragmentation and nascent capitalism meant that educated polymaths could offer their services to different landed aristocratic or royal patrons. Brahe and Kepler fall into those categories. So does Gauss and Euler. The creation of the Royal Society in 1660 created the venue for exploring Natural Philosophy... what ultimately became "science". It was in this atmosphere that Newton was able to publish the Principia (1687)
It's hard for us to understand this today, but science as we know it did not really exist back then in either England or anywhere else.
The invention of gunpowder in China came about from searching for an elixer of immortality. The original book on Al-Jabr was written for practical purposes in the 9th century, around the time when the foremost scholars of the Islamic Age (See Al Ghazali) would argue that ascribing the origin of the universe to a chain of cause and effect rather than the direct action of God was a form of atheism and therefore apostasy.
Europe wasn't really any better in this regards even in the 17th century. Isaac Newton himself spent the vast majority of his career working on alchemy and searching for the Philosopher Stone which he believed was harbored in the Book of Revelations.
It took decades, and the generation after Isaac Newton to begin to adopt the philosophy that many natural phenomena could be ascribed to mechanical laws (like the physics of Newton), and it's from that philosophical foundation that led to the invention of "science"
That they lost control to some guys that had to travel around entire Africa to get there shows how incompetent and backwards thinking they were. It would be impossible to conquer 100m happy and productive people with just 1000 people even if the 1000 had a bit better guns, especially since the 100m happy and productive people easily could just reproduce the new modern guns.
That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies, both in refusing to adopting the superior European technology and by continuing to oppress their own people to such a degree that their people didn't really care much about a foreign power replacing their old tyrants.
> That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies
Agree. But that's exactly my point: they were prosperous pre-colonization. The point at which this thread started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50004651 argues that these places were incapable of creating prosperity and needed Europeans to teach them. That is simply incorrect and kind of racist.
They faltered at the wrong point in history and got colonized (or in China's case, merely bossed around - if that's inaccurate, sorry I'm not strong on Chinese history). As a result they lost out on a century of industrial, economic, cultural, and social growth and reform that happened in Europe.
You only have to look at Japan - never colonized, adopted Western technology and ideas organically, is economically advanced today - to see the counterfactual.
Technically India and China were both conquered by Central Asian Warlord societies before Europeans arrived. In India's case by the descendants of Timur, and in China's case due to severe political and environmental issues at the end of the Ming Dynasty. These warlords arguably had even fewer resources and greater militarism than later European conquerors
That was centuries before European colonization began. They recovered, and by the 18th century, were the most prosperous, productive regions of the world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50009485
Well my point was in a way, the warlords were still in charge, even though they adopted the cultures of the peoples they conquered.
Although in a sense, Great Britain itself is not dissimilar in that it was conquered by Normans (descendants of quasinomadic Vikings)
I see your point, yeah they would manage without others going in and bossing them around. They had everything in place to transition to a modern society unlike some of the less developed parts of the world, so Europeans meddling with them didn't really help.
They would likely follow a similar path as Russia or Japan, Russia is pretty far from western Europe already so ideas took longer to get there so they modernized much later, and we can see how that turned out. Russia being so oppressive and rotten were very vulnerable to any sort of modern ideology and fell to communism, that sort of transition was inevitable for these countries, Russia tried to delay it and it was forced upon them, Japan saw the writing on the wall and made the transition deliberately etc.
> The hedonistic generation of leadership that came out of this era basically lost it all.
I don't think that's correct; the end of Empire was the two world wars. Much of the empire didn't leave until the late 40s/early 50s.
The British Empire controlled something like ~20% of the world and other European powers were adding in 10% here and there. Probably more than that weighted by economic and military strength. It is kinda on the British elite that the world wars even started. Even with the most charitable read we're talking about a situation where the message was "lets not break the power of Europe" and they couldn't sell it to Europe.
The world wars were a crisis that caused change, but that is a bit like going bankrupt. Just because the crisis is fast doesn't stop the process being slow.
> Even with the most charitable read we're talking about a situation where the message was "lets not break the power of Europe" and they couldn't sell it to Europe.
That feels like retrofitting a modern frame onto a very different situation? I don't think any of the European elites thought in terms of "the power of Europe" as any kind of unified front vs the rest of the world until after they lost the world wars. It was intra-European conflict as it always had been. England/France/Germany(+)/Spain/Austria against each other; those elites that were unhappy with the fallout of the last great redistribution of power at the Treaty of Utrecht.
(there's probably a chunk of history I'm missing as to how Russia went from enemy of Britain at the Crimean war in the 1850s to the ally in the Triple Entente which caused France and Britain to go to war with Austria-Hungary; but WW1 is definitely not the fault of the any kind of British elite, we can blame it on the Austrians and, of course, the Serbs and ultimately one guy with a gun)
The rest of the world wasn't conceived of as independent powers until the Russo-Japanese war. They were prizes to be allocated among the (European) players. At that time, it was even conceivable that the European powers might take and divide China as they had done with Africa and India.
(+) strictly, Prussia; remember German and Italian unification happened during the Victorian era.
Ww1 and ww2 had a lot to do with Germans lusting after British Imperial greatness (having missed out on large colonization due to lack of national cohesion prior to 1870)
> That feels like retrofitting a modern frame onto a very different situation?
What, the British weren't up the challenge of forecasting a major war in Europe might end badly for them? I mean, I'm sure their leadership didn't, but that is why they don't get to run an empire any more.
> but WW1 is definitely not the fault of the any kind of British elite, we can blame it on the Austrians and, of course, the Serbs and ultimately one guy with a gun
It looks a lot like the fault of the British elite. They failed to use their influence to get a positive result in Europe; which descended into a bonfire over 40 years until it ran out of fuel to burn and half the continent was under the thrall of communism. And if they were doing something productive in the mean time overseas it didn't deliver much result. There'd be an argument that their laissez faire attitude was a problem except they kept actively declaring war on Germany over and over until their empire fell apart.
That generation of British leadership demonstrated no capacity to get positive results apart from a remarkably swift decommissioning of the largest empire ever built. I suppose history can remember them in the positive light that as group they could have failed even worse except they at least had the good sense to bring in US management before the situation became unrecoverable.
The article mentions Churchill who was a major leader in both world wars. He also served as a lancer at the Battle of Omduran and grew up during the time of Empire born smack dab in the middle of the Victorian Era (1870s). His generation formed the leadership of the empire during that period.
The generations BEFORE the Victorian Era enabled it excesses. People who were born IN the Victorian Era (which this article seems to argue were responsible for Britain's success) formed the leadership caste of Britain's ultimate downfall in the World Wars.
The Industrial Revolution was caused by capitalism. As other countries liberalized their economies, the British Empire faded. Even worse, the UK became more socialist over time.
You're on HN, don't you know!
> where they have substantial control over public policy
Substantial influence. The fact that America's rich are constantly mobilizing to promote or defeat ballot measures and candidates shows the limits of their power.
The government is always infighting.
> government is always infighting
By design. That's what separation of powers–and the division of power–is intended to do.
Huge pools of money got Trump elected, not sure what youre talking about.
Do those huge pools of money wanted restrictions on immigration and high tariffs?
Why is populism doing so well on the right? Is that what the pools of money want?
> Why is populism doing so well on the right?
It's doing well on both sides. The Republican Party was just more willing to compromise its values to give them power. The debate over electability in the Democratic Party, on the other hand, is taking longer to manifest, but is probably going to result in far fitter candidates than e.g. Ken Paxton.
I do wish you'd define terms.
> Why is populism doing so well on the right? Is that what the pools of money want?
I think it is. It’s hard to believe Musk doesn’t want China tariffs and he loves the hard right agenda. Those like Thiel have some deeply dubious views.
But it’s not so much the political views as the opportunity that exists at the moment. Give Trump enough money and you can do what you like.
Thiel's main goal is no income tax. One of his other goals is autarchy. Ridiculously high Chinese tariffs dovetail with this just fine.
Thiel is almost openly a monarchist.
In 2016, Clinton spent $576.4 million and Trump spent $332.4 million. In 2024, total spending including PACs was $1.6B for Biden/Harris and $1.1B for Trump. There was less money behind Trump both times.
"Oxbridge tutors believed overwhelmingly that the purpose of an undergraduate degree was not training for work nor even preparation for academic research, but rather a general moral and intellectual formation that would fit students for any professional role they might later pursue."
This is what the Japanese are still doing; the top companies seek out top achievers regardless of the major, and then employ them, and teach them the things the employee lacks inside the company.
Many private K-12 schools in the US are also doing this. It's the type of education my parents wanted for me, and for college they thought likewise about the importance of liberal arts, in the classical sense of that term (intellectual pursuits as distinct from practical trades).
This type of education is not for everyone, though.
A lot of parents are choosing a public school because it's doing the equivalent of that as well. Private schools can select out the undesirable students, but so long as there's only a few of those your life is better for meeting the undesirable people in the world.
Undesirable is of course is to find different by different people. The larger point is so long as the undesirable people are not overwhelming the school and bringing you down, it's actually good to meet them. Maybe you'll bring them up, but even if you don't, it helps to broaden your viewpoint of the world and helps you to not become a bigot.
Absolutely disagree that it's not for everyone. It's exactly what makes a robust and educated populace. Relegating someone to aircon technician and telling them that makes them just as smart as a liberal arts major is disrespectful to them, if they could but be educated enough to understand it.
this is in part due to the structure of the japanese economy and it's businesses. Businesses hire for life, encourage their employees to experiment, and dip their hands into as many parts of the economy as possible. Compare to America where companies hire and fire at will and build their entire value proposition around specialized products. Only the biggest companies generalize, and even then, within their niche.
Japanese salarymen are not at all "encouraged to experiment", they are forcibly relocated to different roles/departments/cities every few years, regardless of interests or skills. Stories abound of art majors being told to go learn programming, which also explains the generally woeful state of Japanese software.
The higher ups take notes along the way. Those who do well get fast tracked for management, where hands on experience in various roles comes in very handy. Those who don't, on the other hand, end up where they can do the least damage.
This is what most prestigious white-collar firms also do in the west. Think high finance, management consulting.
If you nail the interview, Goldman Sachs won't really care whether you studied Economics or History of Art at Harvard. The main concern is that you studied at Harvard, which signals that you're a high-performer.
Insane that this whole thing never mentions once the legions of servants who did their laundry, cooked their food, poured their Port and generally did all the work.
Because it was not any different from any other aristocracy in the world at the time. The question the article is trying to answer is "why Britain?" Of all the competing european empires what made that particular one especially successful?
Britain had large amount of colonies and therefore access to a large market. The markets were designed to extract wealth, see for e.g. https://averyreview.com/issues/57/empire-salt-tax
The industries in Britain had access to such huge monopolistic markets, so not really a surprise.
Britain was the largest empire in history and covered 25% of the Earth's surface area. What was it which allowed them to become the largest empire in history?
Having lots of ships and not needing a standing army to defend against neighboring countries who share a land border.
A navy is, effectively, mulitpurpose when it comes to trading and colonies and such in a way that an army is not. Therefor countries that can invest only in a navy are at an advantage.
Also, while it is true that the british empire was very large and impressive by almost any measure, and I don't want to downplay it too much, it's worth remembering that a very, very large portion of that empire was made up of the indian subcontinent, and while they certainly had political control over the place, the actual reality was a (very) tiny elite who replaced the previous group of rulers.
Also this empire as described lasted barely 100 years.
A lot of things. The British empire is a master class in financial engineering (largely by luck imo). They started by raising capital via IPOs to create trading companies. The first successful ones were the ones that established the 13 colonies that became the USA and Jamaica.
While they maintained control over those, they engaged in war and looting against the established Spanish empire. They managed to entice the Indian elite by being extremely effective at paying back loans using the loot they got during the Spanish era. Internal division among elite in India meant that the bankers in bengal thought they could use the British for deposing a king they did not like and at the same time handle the raids that the Marathas were performing. The British essentially used the money to bribe the king's army and took control of Bengal (which was the ricebasket for one of the largest empires of the time and the largest cloth producer). Unfortunately for said bankers, once the British took control of bengal they betrayed the bankers who lent them money. They raised an army of local sepoys and went on to take the rest of the subcontinent (although this was a slow painful process).
Even as the US revolted and gained independence, the British found themselves with a growing colony in India where civil wars and divisions between kings made it easy for the British to move in. One thing to remember is that when we talk of a British army at this point it really is an army where the lower ranks are made of Indians who were trying to make a living (as it turns out British were just better paymasters than their local counterparts).
Once they conquered India, they moved east and use Indian soldiers to take on Chinese while waging the opium war (and making a tonne of money from the trade of drugs).
Ive glossed over a bunch of things but honestly the success of the British in the 1800s is built over many many years of multiple investments some of which started in the 1500s (for instance their acquisition of Mumbai was entirely by sheer dumb luck as it was part of a dowry given by the Portuguese, who in turn received it as part of a peace treaty with a local ruler)... Many of the things that brought them success was a result of fairly immoral behaviour. And while their governing class in Europe is fairly small they had massive local administrations run by locals reporting to them.
The navy absolutely was key. But apart from that mercantilism was instrumental. They used trade companies, the most famous being the East India company, as front which allowed the government to deflect responsibility coming their way and this incentivized the moneyed class in Britain as they could "invest" in the colonial loot.
Aren't all empires extractive? How is that supposed to be distinctive to Britain?
If you compare Thailand (never colonized) with India pre-independence, they look about neck-and-neck in terms of development. At a glance, it seems Britain "looted" India to about the same degree that the Thai monarchy "looted" Thailand.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/augmented-human-developme...
The outward flow of money amd the second order effects like famine make mercantile colonialism more exploitative. A good counterpoint to Thailand is Britain becoming insanely wealthy by contemporary standard during Victorian era.
Sure, the British aristocratic class did exploit the working class. But then we're no longer talking about geographies.
"The outward flow of money amd the second order effects like famine make mercantile colonialism more exploitative."
So why was India's development status comparable to Thailand in that case?
"A good counterpoint to Thailand is Britain becoming insanely wealthy by contemporary standard during Victorian era."
Britain was the first country to industrialize. Switzerland and the US also industrialized early, and did not have a massive colonial population to exploit. But you can see their per-capita GDP was still in the same neighborhood as the UK in the late 1800s:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-p...
A lot of stories that Indians tell about their history fall apart when you look at the data. You can argue that Britain delayed India's industrialization, but since most of Asia was not industrializing at the time, it's a bit of a dubious argument. I have little doubt that Britain exploited India, but I don't think it was a historically exceptional type of exploitation.
Non colonized countries like China and Nepal were still semi-colonized due to unfair treaties. Japan which largely remained free did industrialize.
A debate does exist around the how much of India's decline can be attributed to the British as fragmentation of central political authority started long before British arrival.
US and Switzerland had their respective advantages like large domestic market and high value industries. The population of these nations had the time to learn and adapt. The familiarity to western education obviously helped as transferring IP was relatively easy. These opportunities were absent in company ruled India(things did improve marginally once the crown took over). I would largely agree British colonial rule was not exceptional when compared to other mercantile colonies. But I do not see the similarities to Mughal rule of India where the wealth stayed in-house and was even invested locally, the key difference being assimilation vs extraction.
You're still disregarding Thailand. Not colonized, wealth "stays in-house". But that doesn't necessarily lead to industrialization. If the rulers spend the money on entertainment for themselves, that's essentially the same as sending it abroad, from the perspective of a peasant.
IIRC India's GDP was approx. 25% of the world's in 1700s compared to Thai 1% around the same time. In case of India it came down to 3 to 4% in 1947. So India faced quite a drop.
I don't think comparing an already declined India to Thai is a fair comparison.
Isn't this "drop" because other countries grew and India did not? Wouldn't that cause Thailand to "drop" in a similar manner?
See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-maddison-project-data...
Based on the Maddison Project data, it looks like India's economy never had a huge shrinking event. It was just outgrown by other economies.
In 1700 India was by far the world's most populous country (using modern borders): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?tab=map&time=1...
High population probably explains India's high GDP share in 1700.
India's economy didn't get a boost because there was practically no industrial policy. British authorities would get their raw materials at gunpoint from the colonies, ship it to Britain for processing, and then ship the finished goods back to colonies (which were artificially shielded from the international markets).
Before getting absorbed by East India company, some native kingdoms/empites did start with modernizing their military which indicates there would be a strong effort towards industrialization if it weren't for the British regulations.
A suppression of economic activity would describe slow shrinkage of GDP.
India was always populous, so that was a constant.
You may also like to read about increasing famines in British controlled regions, how food crops were forcibly replaced with cash crops and so on. E.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394628864_An_analys...
Unfortunately not many people understand or appreciate how colonialism destroys a country and they just see the end result and claim that the citizens of the country were incapable of developing by their own.
Not only economical, but also psychological (as in lose of self confidence) and cultural (assuming own culture is somehow inferior to the rulers) destruction happens. It is not much different from abused people losing self confidence and blaming themselves and additionallyhaving to suffer victim blaming from others - just at a nation scale.
> Britain had large amount of colonies
This is just a restatement of "they were successful". Yes, but why?
I love comments like this... they say "well like just build amazon, easy as that"
Yeah but why did they have the biggest and best empire in history?
The legal framework was a big part of the puzzle. Britain's lawyers and legal system were head and shoulders above their peers. Colonies and companies in charge were controlled by complex legal contracts guaranteeing profits to those in charge, from the Crown down.
In most cases, the indigenous populations signed their rights away first through clever negotiation and the companies subsequently used force to enforce their contractual rights. Over time, the companies themselves could not muster sufficient force to maintain status quo as they relied mainly on mecenaries who could only be sourced from the local populations and were notoriously fickle, so the Crown inevitably took charge.
The Industrial Revolution hugely increased production and improved logistics.
The Navy was the best in the world.
There was a capitalist investment culture which linked elements of the aristocracy with inventors and traders, so ventures were relatively easy to fund.
The Royal Society helped spread scientific research and insights.
Private military ventures like the East India Company were closely linked to the state and 'too big to fail' (at least for a while.)
The educational system produced administrators, adventurers, soldiers, and politicians with an unshakeable, almost cult-like, sense of patriotic entitlement.
Britain was isolated physically, which meant the possibility of a distracting land war stopped being a risk after Waterloo, and sea war more or less after Trafalgar.
Basically England was a mature nation state with stable borders and a workable (if brutal and very imperfect) investment-oriented economy, while the other European powers were still fighting each other and - in many cases - trying to self-organise a national identity.
The UK, not England!
The article says.the education they received was less rigorous than schools in France, Germany or Italy. Despite this and the educational focus on the classics Britain made huge contributions to science and technology. Maybe schools did not matter that much educationally, but did, as you say, create loyalty and character.
The Brits weaponized their most intelligent, and made them work for the crown.
That being said, mercantile navy based nations never really last beyond a few hundred years compared to the nations near the Steppe.
Mercantile entities like the East India Company operated with little to no oversight. This is bound to rile up natives rather soon as oppression and loot are the only objectives. Britain had to fold the company to maintain its rule over India(after a revolt).
This is certainly in contrast to something like Norman invasion of England or Mongol invasion of China where the invaders fused with the local culture.
> This is bound to rile up natives rather soon as oppression and loot are the only objectives.
it was a lot more complex than "natives" vs the East India Company. In many places they replaced Mughal rulers who were not natives either. Some groups of natives supported them in order to get rid of rulers or existing oppressive systems (or they did not care because it made little difference to them).
> Norman invasion of England or Mongol invasion of China where the invaders fused with the local culture.
The Normans fused gradually, over time. Longer than British rule in India lasted. There were many cultural influences both ways, as can be seen in language, cuisine, political and legal institutions. British people who remained in India became Anglo-Indians, and much the same happened elsewhere in the Empire.
Local rulers who descended from Mughals were largely considered natives. Taking Siraj-ud-Daulah as example, it's true that the Local population was happy to see him go(at least the non Muslims were) but he was definitely considered a native, especially when compared to Europeans.
The key difference I was trying to highlight with my comment was assimilation vs extraction. By early 19th century, it was pretty clear among British polity that India is to be treated as a colony for resource extraction and nothing more.
How's this different from modern-day "aristocracy"? Don't they get servants who do their laundry, cook their food, pour their Port, and generally do all the work?
Port is generally poured by people at the table. There is an etiquette to it.
> Insane that this whole thing never mentions once the legions of servants ...
OK but we're talking about a period where the UK was the world's first superpower.
I understand you want to portray the despicable conditions of servants living in rich people's houses in Victorian britain but...
Wanna have a talk about the living conditions of people in, say, Eritrea at the same time? (Eritrea has never really been colonized btw so the whole "it's because of colonialism" angle doesn't really work).
Or even just the living conditions of poor people in Britain who happened to not have jobs as servants for the rich?
My great-uncle (a radiologist) and my great-aunt (she had a pharmacy) had a servant during a bit part of their lives, Tess: and she was basically part of the family. Sure she did the laundry and cooking and cleaning but she never struck me as some oppressed human being living in misery. What I remember from visiting them was my uncle in his office, always working (analyzing radio from patients, writing (snail) mails to other doctors, etc.) and Tess always working too: just a different kind of work.
People getting paid to work for other people doesn't imply slavery. We could of course also have a talk about actual slavery, what were the last countries to officially abolish it, who were the biggest slavers in the world, which countries still have actual slaves (and sex slaves) today, etc.
I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.
Countries in their industrial era are quite literally not unlike third world countries.
England at its Victorian era looks like an overpowered Brazil than anything even close resembling the US now.
> I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.
Indeed not. Being in service provided one of the most desirable careers you could hope for as a working class Victorian. When your options look like pit, mill, or factory, cleaning floors in a nice warm house is a good alternative. And that was just the foot in the door: there was progression available. Those jobs were hard to get, prestigious, came with their own status hierarchy, and could keep you set for life.
This isn't completely true. Some of them got so little sunlight that they developed illnesses as a result.
I did not know that. But almost everybody in the working classes suffered from awful work-related health problems in Victorian Britain. Some vitamin D deficiency for a scullery maid compares to a miner's black lung or that ghastly phossy jaw that afflicted match girls.
I think the best form of this work was probably to be staff on an absentee landlord's estate. While the master or mistress was away, you would have little work to do except cleaning or maintenance, and probably could get away with having a life of leiaure.
The post explicitly sets out to describe the lives of the Victorian elite, not their servants.
Those are just implementation details. Does that contradict in any way the point that the elites were incredibly successful? Read your sentence again: these people created a system where a legion of servants did all sorts of various tasks for them while they partied and enjoyed themselves and the output of that was a globally dominant empire. Sounds unequivocally impressive.
This is addressed near the beginning as the Orthodox view:
> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true.
Also:
"Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically."
You mean exactly like rich cunts today? You never hear a politician or a CEO say "boy am I glad all those interns do the bitch work so I can look good on TV".
Anthony Scaramucci says pretty much that on the podcast ‘The Rest Is Politics, US’.
He didn’t do very well in his 7 minutes in politics, so maybe that’s part of it.
And also millions of poor and suffering people from the colonized countries. Millions of them died of famine. I'm not sure how much we can learn from those elites.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine^H^H^H^H cricket, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans^H^H^H^H^H British ever done for us?
Brought peace!
Yes, before the British arrived none of these colonies experienced famine and were in effect a cross between the Garden of Eden and an Ewok village.
Perhaps not blaming everyone else for their misfortune also helped the British succeed?
It did mention the colonial empire up near the beginning.
> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.
> Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well.
The essay is intentionally exploring an alternative to the obvious one. I think the essay does brush off the cruelty of the empire too quickly, but cruelty isn’t inherently profitable, so there’s still some explaining to do.
World War I killed so many victorian elites off and destroyed their culture because it proved honor culture inferior to industrialized killing
WW1 was nearly a generation after Victoria's death.
It was the 'extinction' of the victorian era's structure of society. Come on you can understand this.
That is an oversimplification. It was the effective end of the Edwardian era, which contained some of its own tendencies.
*inferior to industrialized versions of ancient cultures. The Victorians essentially gave up all sense of their medieval culture (Longbowmen and archer traditions, Yeoman farmers) for immense wealth and new luxuries (Tea, tea houses, Opium, and lots of parties).
This led to their decline within 200 years, compared to China or the Roman Empire. The Chinese had to deal with the incompetent Qing, but luckily they survived as a culture, and learned a lot from Deng Xiaoping.
> cruelty isn’t inherently profitable
agreed. But it takes tremendous amounts of stupidity to not be profitable while cruelly exploiting millions of people and their resources.
Exploiting people and resources is a terrible way to be extremely profitable; it's very inefficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
This is why economics is called "the dismal science"; slaveowners got mad that economists told them having slaves was inefficient and decided the economists were bores.
other than the fact that success is mostly just luck (and lack of morality), not hard work.
I wouldn't say there was a relative lack of morality compared to other elites. Quite the opposite actually.
I don't know man.
The great famine of Ireland, The great famine of India, and even The late Victorian Holocaust is a thing.
It is also well documented where other empire wanted to help the starving people, but denied because it would make them looked bad.
I really can not see that they are not lack of morality.
Countries that were not under an empire also had famines and other disasters (China had a civil war with 50 million killed, IIRC) as well as endemic practices like slavery.
Sure. But we're discussing Victorians here.
If you had a Rawlsian veil over your eyes, and someone said you could be born in any empire throughout history, but without knowing your place in that empire, which one would you pick?
Are there empires you would rather have lived in?
This always comes up.
Those famines were not created by the Victorians. They were all originating in natural disasters that the locals were unable to handle for themselves. The claim that the Victorians did something immoral is an ideological one, as it's effectively a claim that even though they did try to help they could have tried even more - and not rising to that level of assistance (determined arbitrarily by moderns who were not there) was somehow evil.
This view is usually also implying without stating that it is uncharitable or morally wrong for governments to not suspend free markets and impose a communist planned economy the moment there's a natural disaster. That's a highly controversial view (and a wrong one if you want something that works), but it gets slipped into criticisms of the Victorians all the time.
This is the same logic that says shutting down USAID killed people. It's an attempt to convert the possibility of charity into a hard moral obligation - but if accepted, that would make it no longer charity.
Specifically:
• The Victorians did provide aid to Ireland during the potato famine.
• In India they did also provide aid, organized relief camps, suspended tax collection, and spent large sums of taxes and Victorian Brits made large numbers of charitable donations. It didn't look so different to the various aid campaigns for Africa in the 20th century.
• There is no such thing as the "late Victorian Holocaust". That's a concept from a book written by a Marxist in 2000 that argues that capitalism is the same thing as genocide, and frankly seems incredibly offensive to survivors of the actual holocaust.
It´s true that some Victorians organised aid for Ireland during the famine, it is also true that other Vicorians, English origin who were landowners in Ireland courtesy of the Cromwell invasion in the 1650's, exported large amounts of food from Ireland during the famine, to pay some of the bills mentioned in the article. Many land owners in Ireland were heavily in debt, with mortgages on their property. Potatoes were peasant food, and the failure of the crop, combined with lack of control over the food suppliers, led to the death and forced immigrations of millions. The population of Ireland is still lower in the 21st century than it was in the 19th.
So we can take a look at it with 21st century eyes, and consider that actual control is a nebulous thing, and that the absentee landowners were protecting their interests, while some at least of the local ones, including anglo-irish intervened to try and help the people on their estates. but then we also have to dig into the fiasco that is the 1847 Poor Law extension relief act, which sets up systems for relief that effectively dispossess people of their land, and makes the entire thing much worse.
Did the people creating the act understand systemic behaviour well enough to predict the consequences? Do we even understand these things well enough now? The interaction between debt and market pricing, and its inevitable consequences are playing out in real time now with AI.
Man this is dumb.
Ireland produced more food than it needed, even if we don't count potatoes. It was exported, mainly to England, as other markets could pay more. Plenty of other things the victorian's did to make the situation worse. Mainly thanks to free market idealists.
Pre colonial India had famines and many ways to handle them, the British did away with them. The system they set up and replaced made it a lot worse and whatever small trickle of help they provided clearly wasn't enough.
I don't know why you're trying to whitewash colonialism. That it's immoral is pretty simple, they let millions of people die for profit.
> Those famines were not created by the Victorians.
The one in Ireland certainly was. The famine was an outcome of the exploitative economic system that they imposed on the native Irish population. The problem wasn't that there wasn't enough of food available in Ireland (or that it didn't have the capacity to produce enough food). Rather the people living there couldn't afford to buy it and due to free trade/laissez-faire policies imposed by Britain that food was exported to England.
> • The Victorians did provide aid to Ireland during the potato famine.
Yes they gave back a tiny fraction of resources they extracted from Ireland back. Fact is that if Ireland had its own government and wasn't an exploited colony the outcome would have been very different.
Are you really gatekeeping the word 'Holocaust'? The late Victorian Holocaust fits many definitions of the word that are documented in sources like Merriam-Webster. I find your gatekeeping of the word holocaust offensive to survivors of all other non-WW2 holocausts.
Also, why can't capitalism be capable of genocide?
Elites are generally immoral, even today. I mean only in relative terms, they were no worse than others. On the positive side, they did quite a few pro-social things as well (abolition of slavery, for example).
This has it backwards. The Victorian elite had a high standard of life because they had an empire that funded their decadent lifestyle - at the expense of their colonies! They were cushioned from negative consequences of their be debaucherous lifestyle.
Such macro effects exist today as well, in certain countries, that enjoy exorbitant privileges.
A focus on STEM is how a up and coming nation builds itself — innovation, and making something the world wants, rather than subjugation or rent seeking.
The ancestry of the Victorian gentry can be traced back to the late medieval period (and some to the Norman conquest), many centuries before Britain had an empire.
The wealth of the merchant class also predated empire by centuries; the empire grew out of a series of alliances and partnerships of both ot these classes, via the landed gentry successfully co-opting mercantile wealth (e.g. see what happened to the East India Company).
That may be, but I think my point about the decadent lifestyle DURING the period of empire still stands.
No it doesn't
Victorian era was the time when Britain had consolidated its empire in the east and fruits of industrial revolution were ready. I guess that lowered the incentives for innovation. In contrast, Britain made some good scientific progress in the run up to WW2(and the war also expedited some of it, Alan turing's work for instance).
Missing the forest for the trees. Spain had extreme wealth from colonies, but wasted it on nothing but debauchery.
Britain had wealth from colonies and maintained an empire with very few people and no computers. The British elites were on an entirely different level to the spanish ones, which is the point of the article. Great Britain had an extremely capable and educated bureaucracy that maintained an empire and was first to industrialize as a result.
> Spain had extreme wealth from colonies, but wasted it on nothing but debauchery.
I disagree with this, I don't consider "expensive wars with other European powers" to be debauchery.
Losing the entire Spanish Armada [1] was a very expensive mistake, but the reason the Armada was lost was because the Spanish crown wanted to invade England over religious differences (England being Protestant, Spain being Catholic), not because they decided to throw a huge boat party and got so drunk they accidentally sank everything.
Much like the wars of the French crown which would end up so hurting the country financially that they caused a revolution, the wars of the Spanish crown also had a rather unpleasant effect on national finances.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Armada
> bureaucracy that maintained an empire and was first to industrialize as a result.
It's not obvious that's what happened. When the industrial revolution started the British empire was still pretty much ad-hoc and in large part privatized and not administered by the government directly (of course the East India company was not exactly an independent corporation). The British Empire in the way we understand it now wasn't really a thing until the mid 1800s or so.
My hypothesis:
1. Empires do not generate wealth, they cost wealth. Or rather they do not generate an economic surplus (the wealth available to the central government via taxation that can be used for whatever the government/elites want). A nation of 10 million will have more economic wealth than a nation of one million, but most of that is needed to keep the 10 million alive and to maintain the infrastructure and pay the local police to keep everyone in line, etc -- only a small fraction of total wealth can be effectively taxed by the empire and spent on arbitrary stuff like increasing the size of the Navy. That is what I mean by surplus.
A nation starts out with an economic surplus (here, I mean a real surplus, not a surplus of silver, but of real wealth) and they use that surplus to get a big army and go conquering. And each time they conquer, a part of that surplus is expended until they reach their maximum extent.
If this was not the case, we'd have a one world government, where the bigger you get, the bigger your surplus and no one can compete with you. But that is not what we see, what we see is that empires expand until they can't afford to keep expanding. Why did England give up its colonies? Because after WW2 it had too many war debts and couldn't keep subsidizing those colonies -- they were too expensive to keep. Same reason for why Rome stopped expanding and had so many financial problems. The check on empire is always bankruptcy. You can look at the trillions the US spends on foreign wars, which far exceeds the economic benefit we get of waging those wars. You can argue, for example, that we got some oil from Iraq, but we still have to pay for that oil, so whatever discount we got on oil comes nowhere near the cost of invading and administering Iraq. That is how all empires work -- France was always better off, financially, just paying market rate for whatever minerals it could get in Africa than the massive resources it spent on trying to control and build infrastructure in Africa. Same thing for England. It doesn't even come close, when you add up the cost of the British Navy and colonial administration to whatever discount it got on raw materials over paying the market rate. Same thing for Rome, etc.
2. The situation with Spain was about financial wealth, not real wealth. They discovered huge silver mines in their colonies and were awash with silver. That dumping of money 1) created massive inflation, and 2) caused Spain to run a huge trade deficit, destroying domestic industry, as the Spanish currency was basically overvalued. It was this economic destruction that leads people to think Spain became lazy and stopped producing. They didn't become lazy, but with so much free money causing such high prices, Spanish industry could no longer be competitive with industry elsewhere. This is called "Dutch disease" as the same thing hit Holland and you also see it in the US with our overvalued currency. So you do not benefit, in terms of real wealth, when you dump a bunch of money on a country. You need just the right amount of money -- too much and you get inflation, too little and you get deflation. There is an optimal amount of money for an economy, and Spain exceeded it.
3. Many have studied the reason why England led the industrial revolution, and it is not a majority view that it had anything to do with the colonies. Most point to things like the availability of coal, development of financial markets, and of course the fact that a lot of the steam engine stuff was invented first in England.
1. War costs wealth not empires by themselves. GB created an empire, because their technological and intelligence advantage was so high, the amount of war needed to get it was small. By intelligence I mean the conquering of India by exploiting its cast system. The colonies were simply civilizations that were out of date and had a huge informational disadvantage. WW2 changed that as it was so expensive it bankrupted everyone but the US.
> Same reason for why Rome stopped expanding and had so many financial problems. The check on empire is always bankruptcy.
The down fall of every empire is hubris and corruption. It is what is bankrupting the US and what bankrupted the Romans. They stopped having kids, spent their time partying and tried to make up for it by importing and relying on barbarians.
2. Yes. But the state did not recognize the trap or simply did not care because it was not interested. I'm not exactly a historian, but Spain was somewhat known for having an inbred idiotic monarchy.
3. All of which are a result of an educated, effective elite and bureaucracy.
Competent leadership is the difference between El Salvador now and 10 years ago. It is the difference between Singapore and Malaysia. Both countries are a result of pure force of will of competent leadership.
> 1. War costs wealth not empires by themselves.
Let's count the ways that the empire costs wealth
1. You need to pay for civil administration 2. You need to put down rebellions, which means staffing it with troops/police 3. You have to build and maintain infrastructure 4. You have to protect the empire from foreign invasion -- e.g. Julius Caeser needing to fight the Helvetii 5. You have to pay bribes to local notables to be loyal to you
Let's take a look at Rome in Palestine - it had to constantly put down rebellions, build an enormous temple and civil infrastructure, man the area with troops that need to be paid, fight off invaders. Pay off all sorts of locals.
And yes, a big part of that is military expenditure, but the role of the British Navy was not primarily to enlarge the empire but to preserve the empire, protect shipping lanes, etc.
> The down fall of every empire is hubris and corruption.
This is a moralizing view of history, and things just don't work like this.
While civil administration, police, courts, infrastructure and army all do cost, wealth, I would argue that they also help to create it.
It's a lot easier to create a software company when you live in a world where the power station cannot be held for ransom by bandits, where everyone is educated and speaks a similar language, when there are laws governing the creation of businesses, a financial system, backed by the government, which enables trade to happen easily, etc.
For example, the Roman Empire, in unifying the Mediterranean, led to a large increase in trade - you can estimate shipping volume across the Mediterranean by counting shipwrecks, and the period of ~0-150AD when the Empire was at its peak had a much higher volume of shipping than preceding and following periods.
I think of administration, police, legal and financial system as something like a capital investment - a bit like buying a widget producing machine - you spend the money/effort/resources on it because you expect to get more out of it than you put it.
Corruption is objectively negative. The east indian company not generating wealth is objectively wrong. The roman and british empires were not the same and the roman one required way more war to maintain.
> but Spain was somewhat known for having an inbred idiotic monarchy.
Spain wasn't even a really country until the 1700s it was a collection of states ruled by the same monarch but each of them had their government apparatus and elites whose interests didn't exactly align with that of Castile or the king all of the time. That's just in Iberia, the Low Countries which in the early 1500s were effectively the economic and political centre of what we think of as the "Spanish Empire" caused even more issues and ended up being a huge money sink.
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Tech and STEM people are currently fully in the subjugate and get rent phase.
you are thinking of capitalists, or do you think Sam Altman and Musk are some tech geniuses?
I do not think they are tech geniuses, but the original statement was not limited to tech "geniuses". Overwhelming majority of STEM people are not geniuses.
But Musk specifically is/was admired and supported by STEM people and culture. He was untouchable for years. Tech people share ideologies and ethical values of Zuckenberg, Musk, Amodei, you name it. Tech educated people spent years developing those philosophies and defending them.
> Academic life was dominated by Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. The exact share varied, but the classical languages took up generally at least half of teaching hours, and sometimes as much as 80 percent, especially earlier in the century.
That's so weird to me. How did that tradition hold on for so long? Where did it come from? Who thought that was a good idea?
This theory continues in modern elite American Universities -- they exist not to provide job skills but to deliver a "liberal education" -- one that teaches students to think, be moral, etc. (I read from the brochure here).
Those Ivies that have more job-oriented programs tend to have (at the least) those schools looked down upon in comparison to the more 'pure' academic pursuits, e.g. Cornell's Hospitality school.
While Ivies are not tied strictly to America's true upper class, serving more as a means of entry into the upper-middle and lower-upper, this sort of signaling is an important part of some of the soft benefits they provide students -- it would be gauche to be worried about a job, ne c'est pas?
It's a thing in other countries as well. Schools which teach the classical languages in Belgium are called humaniora (literally 'more human'). About 30% of my classes were Latin and ancient Greek but we would also have more in depth art history classes.
They would lack in other education (like math and sciences) in theory but as it's also the place the best students get their education they tend to just force you to learn both (which is against some protocols afaik).
n'est-ce pas ? Sincerely,the French grammar police
Surely you mean the police grammar French
Alours. merci monsieur
USA universities have lately corrupted the meaning of the word "liberalism", turning it into its opposite. So-called "liberal education" doesn't exist anymore.
Signals must to be costly in order to be effective
Also also hard to fake and easy to slip in. You throw in a Latin quote in your conversation and either the other person gets it and you both know you're the proper class, or they don't and you both know you're higher up the ladder than they are.
This is repeatedly used in Yes, Minister to demonstrate the large class gap between Sir Humphrey (and Bernard) and Jim Hacker.
Also see Count Binface (classics, Oxford) vs Sky News https://youtu.be/MCCVt8IhJkA?t=130
si tacuisses philosophus mansisses ;)
Yup. It’s the shibboleth. Cuius regio, eius religio, and all that.
Spent my childhood at boarding school having my head stuffed full of Latin and Greek. Forgotten all of it.
> Signals must to be costly in order to be effective
Utter bollocks.
A safety pin though ones nose and a pair of ripped tights costs nothing, and signals who one is (or wishes to be) very loudly and clearly.
Cost of a signal is not necessarily just the resources required to emit it, but also what that signal represents to others. Throwing slurs around doesn't take any money but can be very costly.
That signal certainly sounds pretty costly to me, it would not be effective at signaling intelligence though.
If you judge intelligence by appearance, then you are rather foolish; somewhat to your detriment.
If someone has modified their appearance in a way that appears foolish and their intent was to signal intelligence then I my prior would be that they are extra foolish.
Instead if they know Latin then my prior assumption would be that they are intelligent.
Acquiring information is costly (multi armed bandit) which is why signaling is important. Perhaps in the future with AI and attestations we can replace expensive signals with cheaper ones that are more difficult to fake and thus more honest.
With the improvements in machine intelligence I have become much less concerned with human intelligence and only persist with disagreeing with netizens out of a quickly fading residual sentimentality.
Remember that religious study was the driving force behind much of the education that went on for a long time. If you view some version of the bible as literal divine word, learning the language it's written in makes sense.
The Catholic church only allowed mass to be delivered in a language other than Latin in the 1960s. If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.
The Anglican church (to which virtually all of the Victorian elite belonged) had phased out Latin since the 17th century. Likewise Victorian scientists, eg Darwin, wrote in English. (If they needed to correspond with their peers abroad, they might use Latin, but many would learn French, German, Russian...)
Its use in the Catholic church probably helped Latin survive as long as it did, but by the 19th century it was already an impractical relic whose prestige in English schools came partly from the fact that it had no actual application.
you're wrong the church originally did the Mass in Rome in Greek and it allows it in several other languages in other regions from the beginning. When the Mass was changed to latin in Rome it was the speaking language of the people. Learning latin was about important for most of the western history because pretty much every important book was written or translated to Latin
If you expect people to cover every detail, you need to be reading rather thick history books, instead of internet comments.
"The Catholic church only allowed mass to be delivered in a language other than Latin in the 1960s" this statement is factually wrong.
> If you wanted to simply understand what was said, you had to learn it.
What an absolutely bonkers concept. I mean, how dare they. I am shocked, I tell you! Shocked! Outrageous. I mean, the Catalonians treated me the same way when I visited Catalonia. I finally just gave up and went home.
The Eastern Orthodox (and other pre-schism apostolic) churches vigorously promote the liberal use of the vernacular in many cases. Even those which had a rather ossified "sacred liturgical" language sort of moved with the times.
With the story about the Roman Catholic Church, it is important to note that the Council of Trent was pivotal here. Trent essentially decreed to suppress/abolish many, many localized liturgies, and replace them all with the Roman-style liturgy. The Latin Church was quite diversified up until that point in the 16th century. Trent looked forward to a truly global and universal church that needed a central point of unity and cohesion. A singular liturgy was ideal to ensure that abuses were minimized and everyone was "playing according to Hoyle" because, as you may recall, two huge continents had just opened up for evangelization beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
So in the days before French became the lingua franca of the U.N. and the world, Latin was truly the proto-lingua-franca. Latin could transmit ideas amongst many people and be well-understood. Latin crossed borders, in ways that German or Euskara or Finnish could not. That is an extremely valuable aspect of a language, and that is why we value English, and Mandarin in much the same way in the 21st century.
The Church did not, however, prevent you from reading Sacred Scripture in the vernacular. The Douay-Rheims was a contemporary of the KJV and many English versions have been produced since then. Many, many vernacular Catholic Bibles. So essentially, if you knew your Scripture, you'd probably figure out the Mass anyway by following along. And as they say, "actions speak louder than words" and also, "a picture is worth 1,000 words" so the act of attending Mass was never quite wasted, as you'd hope to portray.
p.s. The "literal divine Word of God" is Jesus Christ. The Bible, for its part, came later than Jesus, and itself is a product of Sacred Tradition.
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This is why grammar schools are so called, they're talking about Latin grammar
The term comes from the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Yes grammar is literally part of it but more generally it's the learning of facts and definitions.
To know another language is to possess a second soul - Big Chuck aka Charlemagne.
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote an entire journal in Greek in the middle of enemy territory. "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.". Historians criticize his Greek fluency.
The Romans and the Greeks provided a lot of their thinking. They provided models for their buildings and for the empire. The Romans wrote about the way they ran their empire, controlled local tribes and so on... They also provided a rationale for the civilising mission (as they perceived it).
Latin and Greek were useful for coining a lot of the new vocabulary that English had to create for science, industrialisation and overseas adventures.
>In Western civilization, the study of the ancient Greek and Roman classics was considered the foundation of the humanities, and they traditionally have been the cornerstone of an elite higher education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classics
Apparently Oxford only dropped the requirement to have O-Level latin in 1960 (!)
Who thought understanding, in depth, the fundamental bases of their legal system was a good idea?
Academia in Britain was intimately connected to membership of the church and, thus, to the ability to speak Latin to hold services. It held on beyond that tenure out of both momentum and prestige.
That was true in medieval times. From the start of the early modern (e.g. Henry VIII) the Church of England used English for services.
The prestige also accrued because it was the language of the educated in Europe for a long time.
I agree, but latin was the language of the educated in Europe because of the (Catholic) church, and the universities pre-date the C of E by several hundred years.
I was going to answer with just "the church" but the OP specifically asked about academia.
It was the language of the educated because of the Roman Empire. The elites used to study how to be Roman elites before the 5th century, and when Rome fell they just continued, as it was the established sign of higher class. The elite has been educated by Cicero for the last 2 millennia, and continues to be so.
A good analogy is French being the language of the elite in Britain, well after the Normans got merged into the general population.
> and when Rome fell they just continued, as it was the established sign of higher class.
Well not in the west where the elite was replaced by uneducated barbarians for several centuries and it took quite a while for the church to teach them how to read and write again.
Nomen usoris rei convenit...
Henry the Eighth never allowed vernacular service, that was his son Edward the VI.
All academia used latin until quite recently. Because all books were written in latin.
Why do you think all animal species have a latin name? You think the ancient romans classified them?
Genuinely bizarre comment. Why do you think the books were written in latin?
They were written in Latin until well into the modern era. Newton wrote his major work in Latin, for example.
Yes, I know. Why the confidence that this contradicts anything I said?
Edit: Re-reading I realise you were reading that as me thinking the books weren't written in Latin, whereas I was trying to get the parent poster to think a bit beyond "the books were written in Latin" to wonder why they might be written in Latin long, long after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Yes. that was how I read it. Sorry for that but think the poster you were replying to got it either.
The other poster seems to have got on the wrong end of the stick about something, but I don't think it's that.
> Newton wrote his major work in Latin, for example.
Newton wrote in Latin because he was, famously, an arrogent bellend. The rest of the sensible scientific community had long since swiched to living langauges.
That doesn't sound right. Newton's contemporaries like Leibniz, Huygens, Halley all wrote much of their most significant work in Latin.
Newton also wrote Opticks in English, perhaps because he was aiming at a more mass market audience.
Do you have a source for this made up information? Seems to contradict with this:
"Leibniz wrote mainly in three languages: scholastic Latin, French and German."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz
"Many of his writings were in Latin"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Linnaeus
The only language that literate people in Europe had in common. Mostly because of the church.
Because other languages didn't have a writing system, which is why every western language is using latin alphabet now.
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Is there a question here or just sneering?
I don't really care to waste my time since you don't really seem interested in learning anything new. Have a nice day.
Mostly sneering, if I'm honest. I love learning new stuff, but I'm not optimistic you can help there.
Go waste someone else's time then :)
> Why do you think all animal species have a latin name?
Good god! This proves you have _completely_ missed the point!
The reason scientic names are in lattin, is BECAUSE it is a dead language. The scientific name can therefore never be confused with the many local/regional names for a species which will always be in a living langage.
Lol… It's because Linneus wrote in latin (a quick look on wikipedia will confirm)… because he wanted other intellectuals to be able to read his works.
Also your theory fails flat in the entirety of south america, some parts of africa and europe where the "local/regional" names are just… the old latin names still used today.
Thank you for the lecture!
I'm impressed by your ignorance!
the clergy.
(Modulo d'oh because of the industrial revolution and the relatively easy wealth extraction that that enabled;) because the British public had internalized (I would venture to this day) the distinction between upstairs and downstairs and did not present a revolutionary risk to the elite. This then allowed the wise decision of the elite to permit social mobility to those who would work to further the broader cause of the Empire, in all domains including sciences. This is likely a very goldilock moment for any civilization: higher valuation of reason over dogma; a techological and economic production jump that enabled a categorical raising of one nation over many others; a mass population that did not think less of its 'betters' because they were slothful extravagents (as long as they 'acted' superior); and finally the creation of a productive and resourceful middle class that was satisfied to help in the administration and operation of an enterprise that was deemed a national cause: the empire.
What a fantastic read. An interesting perspective on schooling. I've been thinking a lot lately if booze is actually a useful thing, it seems the Victorians saw that it is.
Alcohol is social cement in a sense. Pretty good means to achieve Gemeinschaft, I guess.
This is glorious; how we've fallen.
As regards sports, I attended a public school [note the terminology here as per the article], and we still had the "three half day" system. Those of us who were hopeless at sports could actually pursue personal interests in some of those afternoons, but I think that was an innovation.
Completely faulty premise. The British Empire was already globally dominant before the Victorian era. You cannot attribute success nor failure to something that came after the fact; I suppose the Victorian elites were not time travelers. That the Empire has since collapsed does not give an especially strong vote of confidence in their stewardship, however.
Moreover, the article presupposes the notion that STEM is associated with "success", but it has never been associated with the elite in any capacity. Generously, STEM might be considered elite for a peasant. Let us not forget who the current US president is, or the general makeup of both the American and British political systems. Hint: it's not composed of scientists and engineers.
Yeah, exactly. British power came from technological advancements that occurred before the Victorian era: steam engine, spinning jenny, railways, electricity, etc. By the time the elite depicted in this article was running the country, they were largely inheriting that technological lead, and arguably had already lost it by the turn of the 20th century.
Deepmind, one of the top three western frontier AI labs, is headquartered in London. The other two are headquartered in San Francisco.
This really is the takeaway for me. The elites of the Empire come off as lazy and ignorant even when Britain has a massive massive technological lead from the work of organizations like the Royal Society.
The scientific advantage was enormous, and it seems like virtually none of these elites bothered to study the sciences. During that era, the elites of other countries were far, far more ignorant. Compare the socializing and partying of the Victorians with the opium addicted and superstitious Manchurian Emperors of China or the hereditary inbred nobility of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they come off as absolutely industrious.
While Victorian elites were partying it took about 50 years for the Japanese to go from a fully Feudal Society to reaching parity with the Royal Navy (1868-1922).
Disclosure: I did not read the whole thing. I, too, felt the premise was faulty and not worth reading beyond.
First paragraph: "Once adulthood is reached, life follows an austere pattern, with a 5am start, cold baths, daily visits to the gym, little or no alcohol, a Huel-rich diet, and Stakhanovite working hours. This last point generates particular excitement, and descriptions of powerful people dwell with eager fascination on how many hours they devote to their labors."
Why are we taking the CEOs words at face value? They are notoriously known for doing and saying whatever will most help them succeed. Do they say they do these things? Sure. Do we know if they do? If they look like they workout, they probably do, but otherwise how do we know what they do with their day? Anyone who probably actually does know probably has to sign some crazy NDA. Will lying about their routine help them succeed? Quite possibly. CEOs rarely work their way up in the same company over decades, starting on the factory floor. They are MBAs that hop from one company to the next. So they are incentivized to promote some kind of mystique about themselves to make them seem more deserving over the next hopper. Knowing the lack of ethics associated with CEOs, it is not a stretch to assume there is a lot of fluffery in their self-proclaimed routine.
>STEM is associated with "success", but it has never been associated with the elite in any capacity
Except perhaps in China in recent decades where it's worked rather well for them.
(>China’s leadership understands and emphasizes R&D. Eight of the nine members of China’s Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, including China’s current President Hu Jintao, have engineering degrees. 2011)
The Empire ended far after the end of the Victorian age.
The decline and fall was within a lifetime. Not just a random person's lifetime, but that of a single famous individual. By any of the usual endpoints (Indian Independence, Suez Crisis, Winds of Change/South Africa's withdrawal from the Commonwealth) the Empire ended while Winston Churchill was alive- he was born in the 1874, at the height of the Empire, graduated Sandhurst and joined the British Army in 1895, took Queen Victoria's shilling in several colonial wars, then was Secretary of State for the Colonies in the 1920s, and died after Britain had withdrawn from most of her African holdings.
Within a lifetime or so, which is certainly within a range you would expect for a global empire to collapse; that rarely happens overnight. That said, it is an unfalsifiable supposition, as much as the article's supposition is, although I framed mine in less certain terms than the article claiming it as factual that said elites were effective.
you're missing the point: this is a submarine propaganda piece to get the STEM nerds to low-key accept aristocracy
been seein a lot of it lately, yarvin eat your fuckin heart out
Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey, both trained engineers albeit ideologues, just received leadership roles at the pentagon
Mentioning those two dumb dumbs in connection with Winston Churchill, Bismarck, Cromwell, come on, they are not in the same league as Truman, Eisenhower, Grant Lincoln, Tecumseh Sherman, Theodore Roosevelt, the list is very long… Where you can dump them however is in a position right next to Pete Hegseth, or Joseph McCarthy.
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Who is it sitting with Donald Trump at regular meetings? Who is it who was just put in charge of the American Military?
Are you really sure of what you are saying?
You have several comments in this thread. They would all be more useful if you would just plainly state your point and drop the condescending tone.
My point is asking people to sharpen theirs. When they fail to do so, the faults in their statements are exposed, and we all learn something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
As for condescension, I'll kindly note that it was you who was instructing me how to engage people and how I should be writing. When someone is writing a statement that directly contradicts even the news of the past few days, I have to ask if they are sure. I'm not sure if I can be much more deferential than that.
No mention of survivorship bias, or observational bias - framing it as the most 'effective' empire of the time, rather than it was simply 'less bad' than the others. I'd like to have read about maybe the Belgians or French in comparison, and what they did that was 'less effective'.
It ends with this American-centric paragraph:
> Would modern societies work better if their local and national government were conducted by a tight-knit community of extremely rich and successful people? Maybe not: the downsides are obvious. But the problems would be interestingly different from those that they have in reality. Imagine a San Francisco whose Board of Supervisors featured Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, each feeling this responsibility to be the greatest glory of his career, each hoping that he might one day attain the greater glory that is the House of Representatives. It might not be paradise. Maybe it would be a disaster. But it would certainly be interesting.
Well, the Chinese Politburo is 21 people that run a country of (maybe) 1bn people. The progress of China and the lifestyles of a billion people over 40 years is pretty remarkable.
I think this isn't about ethics at all and I wonder why you think it is. It is about size, economics and power of the UK empire in the 1800s. Not being (as much of) a cruel tyrant tends to help with all of these, though.
I didn't once mention ethics, and I wonder why you think I did. Perhaps my last comment? That simply states, and nothing more, that there is a small number of powerful (if not rich) people in control of what might now be the largest empire on Earth today if you measure it by economic output and control (sorry USA), which is what the article talks about: a small group of people, in the 1800s British Empire. History repeating itself, but differently. Power is always concentrated.
Also the article starts with an implicit assumption of survivorship/observational bias, the title being 'Why were Victorian elites so effective?' - the assumption that they really were 'effective' or was the rest of the world simply worse and they were simply the 'least worst'? That line of enquiry was not even discussed.
Seems like a lot of luck could be framed as effectiveness. How much of the British empire was the result of the actions and ideas of the masses of the lower classes?
Think about how important some of the actions and ideas of regular employees of a company can be to the company's success. Now imagine your boss's boss wrote 90% of the future sources of your company's history. How much of the success of regular employees is going to be attributed to the leader versus the boss? How much is glossed over or forgotten just for brevity's sake? A company can still succeed even with a kinda shitty boss if it still has stellar employees, provided the shitty boss doesn't stand in the way. But how many companies can succeed with an amazing boss but shitty employees?
I'm currently reading Andrew Carnegies autobiography. Highly recommend it! He lived around the same age.
He benefitted from his employees ideas and initiatives. But that was by design. Both design of the organisation, design of the incentive structures, and the filters used for hiring.
Companies are just a collective of people trying to accomplish something. The idea that an incompetent boss, could attract talent that would be willing to force great outcomes, without due compensation/incentives, doesn't sound like a credible explanation for the mean story of success.
I was at the Carnegie museum in Dunfermline a few years ago. His childhood home was not particularly big and his origins in Scotland were ordinary. What was of interest was how some of his philanthropy parallels more recent versions... He wasn't just behind fantastic libraries and so on, he was pouring money into proto-globalist organisations much like the Rockefellers more recently.
I think part of the story is the competent Civil Service that deployed the newly created educated middle class. This competent machinery, and very firm social norms in place, the toffs (aristocracy) could delegate a lot of managerial work in addition to the labor they’d delegated for centuries.
I think that extreme prosperity like this (another example - Baby Boomers in the US) is a lagging indicator of geopolitical/industrial power.
Britain was prosperous in the 1800s because of colonialism and the industrial revolution. The US was prosperous in the second half of the 1900's because they capitalized on not being decimated by WW2.
IMO Britain's success in this era was actually sustained prosperity driven by the working class, and the failure to maintain global leadership followed from the victorian attitude of the elite.
They got nothing on American Elites - the current regime is packed to the gills with TV personalities who are incapable of actually doing their nominal jobs, yet they've all done extremely well for themselves.
This article really should not be surprising - the elite go to school to learn to rule - to socialize and develop networks of trust. Doing stuff is for the class below (PMC in today's terms).
> Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically.
I'm surprised this obvious explanation is handwaved away.
> We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test.
Sure...
> Books about successful people often make success sound rather unappealing. Education should be intense and rigorous, focused on driving up IQ and on the ‘STEM’ quaternity of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Once adulthood is reached, life follows an austere pattern, with a 5am start, cold baths, daily visits to the gym, little or no alcohol, a Huel-rich diet, and Stakhanovite working hours.
Books about succesful people tend to focus on these types of hard working ones who build their own wealth. It's more interesting than "hey this rich person got rich from their parents". But the modern elite has enough parasitical rich people who would fit more with the Victorian elites, living mostly off of their parents' wealth and connections, think Paris Hilton, Miss Heineken, the Chinese Fuerdai or the modern nobility.
Based on the premise it seems the author just has gripes with STEM focus and efficiency culture. That seems like a legit standpoint, but it's so weird to try to use Victorian elites to support this point. What about looking at the working class, that actually, you know, puts in all the work?
Lots of debate about luck vs achievement here. Just wanted to point out: they definitely did succeed in not being slaughtered and replaced. So in that sense they owned their success.
The modern elite education doesn't seem that different. If you ignore the weird Bay Area tech bro invented prep schools, your tech elites are mostly from the same few institutions. Forget about Eton, the Phillips Exeter to Ivy pipeline is pretty strong. If you look at the high school backgrounds of the Silicon Valley top founders, they are all mostly cut from the same cloth regardless of how "middle class" they all try to pretend to be.
I would say that being sexually abused by older boys (which what the male relationships at schools largely were) was in any way healthy of helpful to anyone.
I think its possible that humanities based education made for efficient administrators.
Why do you believe that most male relationships at school involved sexual abuse?
I mean the male romantic relationships the article mentions. I did not think this was even contentious with regard to these - its generally known. The "self-government" the article talks about was largely by giving older boys enormous power over younger ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagging
Its mentioned in many memoirs and biographies. Even when apparently consensual the younger boys were far too young to meaningfully consent, especially given disparities in age and power
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This is an especially vacuous article. The elites the author lauds clearly did very little and the “great men of yore” trope is more than a little tired at this point.They did one thing well; ride the wave of technological innovation and utilize security provided by the British navy to conduct commerce. Sarah Pain credits Englands success as the result of mature institutions and a maritime order the royal navy provided ie access to markets. Even today the some of the most profitable enterprises place themselves between transactions (ads, payment networks, etc).
Crediting Britain's elites with the nineteenth century is like crediting Visa with inventing shopping.
> Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically
This leads to two important questions:
1: How much did the Victorian elite really know about the "hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed"?
2: How much power did they really have to end this oppression?
Let's look at a fact and implication:
1: The Victorian Elites were born into, and groomed for, their position in their social hierarchy. They knew of no other position.
2: Their incentives were to maintain their lifestyle, and by proxy, others' lifestyles.
What I take from this:
Economies and supply chains are complicated, and the decision makers at the top have far less power than we think they do. If the elites chose to pass laws to end oppression, what would happen? I suspect that food prices and clothing prices would skyrocket, which would then cause some kind of social unrest, which would then push the elites out of their position.
Or, a greater lesson to take from this is that leadership is always incentivized to maintain the current social order; and that social change comes about from outside pressure; and that outside pressure for change only works when the change is to maintain a status quo elsewhere.
> the downsides are obvious.
author casually letting that hang there after conjuring a picture of the most wonderful lives well lived, and good outcomes for the nation too!
it's ok to yearn for submission to the soothing comfort of paternal benevolence, don't shy away from saying it.
Slavery and Imperialism money.
One of my favorite series is the Asia Saga, which is basically set in different parts of South and East Asia from circa 1600 to 1980.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Saga
It’s a fictional series of course, but one of the smaller details that I am always aware of is how individuals and corporations seemed to be more geopolitically aware, and deliberately trying to “help” the British Empire, directly or indirectly. And the governmental structures were equally as interested in their local interests succeeding. (Often at ethically horrible things, I should add.)
I feel like in the contemporary era, this dynamic doesn’t really exist. American corporations abroad don’t seem particularly interested in supporting the American empire. They are more disconnected from the state they ostensibly belong to, and are far more international and selfish. So there really isn’t the same kind of singular cohesion that was there in the British empire.
> descriptions of powerful people dwell with eager fascination on how many hours they devote to their labors
A point of interest for me is how they end up counting basically anything as working hours because the barrier between work and life has effectively dissolved. Elon Musk for example seems to spend an inordinate amount of time shitposting for someone who claims to work up to 100 hours a week.
But precisely that such "work" is totally self directed makes it significantly different from other forms of work in that it's totally self-defined and practically any activity could be captured within that definition.
So a lot of this mythos of long hours from the wealthy I think is just empty status building for the most part.
Because they exploited the rest.
Old boys club.
Personal gripe - but I absolutely despise the term 'elites'. The emotive implication is always that there is a group of people that are just categorically better than everyone else, but on closer examination you find an equally (if not more so) flawed group of people which exhibit some of the worst traits and characteristics towards their fellow humans.
Beyond their ability to extract money from anyone around them, I fail to see what is 'elite' about the group of people we currently assign the same classification to.
I'm probably just salty that I'm not rich, is all...
The problem is that you are quarreling with the connotation, but the way it’s being used that you object to is a clear direct definition, specifically:
“a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power or influence”
Interesting - you're correct. And the definitions say nothing about morality or ethics, only 'hard' factors that include intellectual pursuits, wealth and power.
Dunno. Just feels like it reinforces my view unfortunately. But a good call out anyway.
Honestly, the elites are categorically better, on average. Not flawless by any mean but in many ways superior.
The Victorian elites had better education, better diet, better lifestyles, better care, etc... So yes, it makes for smarter and healthier people.
If you mean in term of human qualities like morals, kindness, ethics, etc... This is complicated. Many of the elites also tend to be better in that regard too, with a very big caveat. The reason why they are better is simple: it is easier to be generous when you are not in the need, education can play a part too but it can go both ways.
The thing that make elites worse is mostly the consequence of their actions, the "with great power comes great responsibilities" thing. What is an inconsequential for the poor can have huge implication when the rich do it. If you decide to stop buying bread from one bakery will not impact that bakery too much, they loose and gain customers all the time. If you have a restaurant chain and decide to stop working with a baker, you may have ruined him.
That's when things become more complicated, sometimes the elites really are terrible to the people under them, sometimes, they are as good as humans can reasonably be, noblesse oblige. In history, it is not uncommon, when there is a revolution and power is given back to the people to end up very badly.
I don't know how Victorian elites sit on this scale, certainly not all bad, certainly not all good (especially to the colonies), but where exactly is hard to say.
Thiels protege over here
I am definitely middle class, being raised in a middle class family and most people I know are also middle class. Definitely not elite, and I have nothing to do with Peter Thiel, the only thing I know about him is that he is a controversial billionaire.
But most of the times I met people of a high socioeconomic status, they turned out to be really nice and interesting, more commonly hiding their wealth than flaunting it. Sure enough there is the occasional prick, and they are particularly detestable because of how unfair it feels, so they stand out. But they are a minority, at least in my experience.
Note that by "high socioeconomic status", I mean something like the 1%, not the 0.001%, maybe things are different at that level, but I can hardly approach it. But from those who did, it was mostly positive, from a human to human perspective. But these are just second degree anecdotes.
The thing is, when discussing the elite, most people talk about news reports, business decisions, declarations, etc... When they are discussing lower-middle class, they are talking about personal experience, for understandable reasons. We rarely get "I had dinner with Peter Thiel, we talked about the impressionist style of painting and how he commissioned an artist to decorate the guest bedroom in this style" (completely made up story), that is, the small details that make people feel human.
I've had the opposite experience. I've found more middle class people who have a broader education (art, science, technology, literature, etc), than supposed 'elite' people.
I remember a particularly fun conversation where a very wealthy individual (one of the said 'elites') was in a conversation with a lead scientist from one of the CRIs here, and starts going off on a tangent about the energetic components of ley lines and their personal significance to him. Similar views against vaccinations etc etc.
Because of the definition of elite centering around money, power and 'hard' education (e.g. a PhD in a hard science), I've found those people to generally be more shallow but hyper-focused in fewer areas. They may very well achieve highly in that given area, but tend to be uninteresting and unbalanced in most other areas.
I've similarly observed those people to as emotionally unbalanced as the rest of us, but in some cases more childish and petulant when they feel they've been wronged in some way.
Maybe what we're both describing are the extremes of the curve, I'm not sure.
Maybe the conclusion is simply that we shouldn't generalize ;)
Haha I think you're correct there.
> the elites are categorically better, on average
this is quite the statement. i can think of many, many ways they are not categorically “better” … many ways.
i can think of a number of “peasants” who are categorically “better” than “elites” in many, many areas.
i mean, i think most of us here have personally met at least one or two absolute failsons who are absolute dipshits yet will always fall upwards due to who their families are.
It wasn’t solely the Victorian elites — it was the entire elite part of the world in that era. Benefits of second Industrial Revolution, broadly peace, open borders and free trade compared to most of human history, etc. WW1 was a terrible end to (for much of the world; notably excepting China) one of the best periods of human civilization.
I ought to be surprised at the vague glazing of the victorian aristocracy in 2026, but this is hackernews we're talking about. I've no doubt a lot of you would exploit people less fortunate than you for personal gain given the chance, and then turn around and type away about how its 'ermm ackshully a good fing'. unironically , getting their lunch money stolen would've probably been the most valuable lesson on ethics and exploitation they'd get.
I think many here rationalize it as their reward for being clever or fast, and consider the consequences for the rest as natural (in a "Darwinistic" sense) and thus unavoidable. This saves the trouble of being empathetic.
precisely. the types to pat themselves on the back for their "self-made" merits, neverminding the shoulders of countless giants they stand upon, the sheer geographic and financial luck they were most likely born into, etc. I wonder if on some level they believe it to be their birthright the same way the aristocracy of the old did. I can't blame them though, there are forces much larger than them at play, and this quite honestly has been by design; not by some big amorphous boogeyman, but through culture.
I mean seriously people are defending Victorian England as if an entire genra of art (social realism) was not created to describe the horrors of industrialism at the time.
Just look at estimated work hours for the common worker in the before vs after time. (https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...)
Yes there was huge progress and wealth created. But ignoring the plight of the every man at the time is just not a good way to look at history imo.
Otherwise every single period in history was good , because rich people were comfortable at all time throughout history.
I think the answer is boarding school:
> Most students at both preparatory and public schools were boarders, meaning that elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family. In this respect they were distinctive even in their own time: elite families in continental Europe and the United States were far more likely to keep their children at home and educate them at small local private schools. It is plausible that this contributed to the lack of subnational loyalties in the British elite, in contrast to the distinct elites of, for example, the Southern United States, Catalonia in Spain, or Hungary in the Austrian Empire
Less developed, more dysfunctional countries tend to have closer family ties. More developed countries tend to have looser family ties. Sending children to boarding school starting at age 8 is a good way to diminish family ties.
Those who automatically gain leverage of information network, rent seeking, and labor superiority are able to use immense leasure time to better process directional changes. This isnt' automatically true, many Victorian elites went bankrupt, but it is true for some.
What the protestant work ethic is either wrong or intentionally dishonest about, is hard work may inform you of the technicalities of labor, but it rarely gives you the time, enenrgy or education to understand its organizational effeciencies or opportunties.
This is incredibly timely as we have stories and visual evidence of our current oligarchs clearly high on drugs, drunk, or generally indifferent in a leaisure way to the serious science of running our society and business, yet seem to continually get the upper hand in doing it.
Ask yourself ... why?
Ideal state of capitalism: a few ultra rich, and many categories of slaves.
That's actually socialism. Socialism is what it does, not what it claims to do.
WIP drifts more and more towards 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible'. Apart from 1 word in the intro 'parasitically' and not a single mention of slavery, child labour (but boarding schools), women (but very consistent use of 'men') or colonialism (apart from it being used as a _credential_) the entire article literally argues that 'Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg' should run a techno-oligarchy of the absolute worst people? On the other hand the article seems to be unaware the Victorian empire went down and bankrupt because of its decadency, not being able to foresee let alone counter events such as the Indian independence, Japanese offensive and end of slavery alongside its change in economic primitives (see e.g. 'Capitalism and Slavery'). In that sense the article is maybe spot on, showing how completely disconnected the elites are?
They weren't 'effective'. It was colonialism. The Victorian 'elites' just stole everything that wasn't nailed down and didn't need to work as a result which was a system that eventually failed. There's a reason the monarchies and feudalism failed.
Victorian elites lived in a capitalist country in a world full of statists. It's economics. The Dutch were there before.
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The Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833; the government got deep into debt to reimburse the owners for their former slaves. That is not the whole story, of course, but the abolition of slavery before Victoria's reign was one of the brighter spots of British history.
I have bad news for you about the indentured servitude that immediately replaced slavery in the colonies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_indenture_system
Something I've always wondered: What keeps the guards and thugs of the ""elite"" from just killing the elite and taking their money and position?
The boss usually doesn't have any actual physical strength (unless maybe you're Genghis Khan or something)
Imagine 2000 years ago: A merchant prepares a caravan of goods to trek across the wilderness to a far-off settlement. He hires some guards. He sells the goods and pays off the guards a portion of the profits.
What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?
Or a landlord hires some goons to go beat up a tenant for not paying rent on time. Why don't the goons beat up the landlord and take the income from ALL his properties?
Or, after a miserly old oligarch pays off his bodyguards a few times, they'll eventually learn where he keeps all his money. What keeps them from torturing him to give it all to them?
Why didn't Bronn just stomp Tyrion Lannister? He could literally SEE the chest where Tyrion kept all the gold! Why walk around with him and risk getting injured or slain?
> He hires some guards. He sells the goods and pays off the guards a portion of the profits.
> What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?
You shouldn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Let the merchant do the merchanting and make the profits and you hang out and get your paid vacation.
If you take all the profits, the merchant won't stay in the business and then you don't have a client.
That is why societies with effective legal systems are more successful than those without.
There were legal system and courts well before 1000 years ago.
I mean, Ceasar's assassination 2,069 years ago showed that no matter how much "power" the "system" agrees you have, you could be removed at any time by the person standing next to you with a dagger.
Yes, but the stronger the rule of law the greater the deterrent.
It does not really stop assassinations, but it lets the rest of us get on with life without worrying when a thug will take our stuff.
Ceasar's assassination was politically motivated, and performed by many of the most powerful people at that time - other Roman Senators.
I'd describe it more as a power struggle between 'elites'/the people running the country that got violent (indeed, it led to a civil war), rather than a "even the rich are at the mercy of random violence".
In other word, Ceasar dying is basically 'the system' at the time, the Roman Senate, or at least a large part of it, deciding that, actually, Ceasar had a little too much power, and the way to fix that was stabbing him.
I view it closer to Louis XVI being guillotined than Franz Ferdinand being assassinated - the former is a violent transfer of power between elites, the later is an elite being killed by a member of the common people. The former happens because the elites (and sometimes the people as well, although AFAIK Ceasar was quite popular with the commoners in Rome) are unhappy, the later happens despite the elites being happy. The Vienna upper-class probably quite liked Franz Ferdinand, but that wasn't enough to save him. The Parisian upper-class, however, did NOT like Louis XIV, and that got him killed. Similarly, the Roman aristocracy (or rather, a large chunk of it, obviously Ceasar had his fans in the Senate) had an issue with Ceasar, which got him killed.
You need the backing of social organization. Who gets to replace the elite positions or obtains or distributes their wealth? It takes a lot of work to build real consensus for people to just be like "okay, sure!"
And nobody in power is going to allow you to organize to any real extent before interseding. They force you to play with their rules to get in the game. The only away around it is to already be a well known and publically liked figure that people will rally behind.
All hierarchies work like that. In order for the top to gain benefit from wielding the power of the entire hierarchy of lessers, it necessarily means that the coordinated power of each level is greater than that above them (at least on average).
Take a simplified model of a king, a bunch of nobles, beneath whom are a bunch of knights, beneath whom are a bunch of serfs. Collectively, the nobles control more power than than the king. But if an individual noble defects while the others remain loyal, then the King maintains enough power to crush the uprising. So as the King, you have to proactively maintain a status quo where the nobles can't easily collectively plot against you. Classic strategies include maintaining some kind of nebulous ranking, where nobles are constantly competing with each other to garner favor, and thus likely have more to gain outing a rival noble's conspiracy than joining it, keeping the nobles sufficiently comfortable such that the risk of losing that comfort acts as friction against plotting against you, and in times of extreme distrust, keeping the nobles close at hand such that you can take decisive action against the individual noble before the forces they control can show up.
At each level of the hierarchy, recursively apply similar strategies. Nobels need to keep control of their knights, knights need to keep control of their peasants.
Except this tends to only get really "interesting" at the top. That's because the middle layers can call on their peers or even on their superiors in times of crisis. Hence peasant rebellions basically never succeed, since their aristocrats will simply apply to the king or to their peers to help them crush it.
But the king has no superiors and even his peers are not quite as much available, so the politicking at that level gets much less stable.
That kind of event happens sometimes.
The first reason it’s not more common is that wealth isn’t so static. Landlords have to collect rents, oligarchs have to skim off the top of their corrupt enterprises etc. A guard who kills the landlord, then manages to organize rent collection for the benefit of other guards, has essentially become the new landlord.
The second reason is that a guard doesn’t just have to kill the landlord, a guard potentially has to kill all the other guards who want all the landlord’s wealth for themselves.
Since rent has to be collected anyway, and an individual guard has a low chance of surviving against all other guards, remaining a guard is a lower risk option.
Hire relatively stupid people, pay them well, have several security organs and nurture a sense of competition between them.
>What keeps the guards from taking all the profit?
This does happen but yes obviously attempts are made to prevent it, the guards my not be familiar with the journey, other guards may be family members or trusted friends. Often then the guards become the Merchant then.
You see this with the billionaires building luxury apocalypse bunkers in New Zealand and other exotic locales that are like mini theme parks. It slowly dawns on them that when society breaks down that's exactly what it means. You can't depend on normal social norms or laws anymore, how do you stop your security team from kicking you out of your own bunker, how you do you charter a flight to your bunker? It's a problem with no guaranteed solution.
Prepping is different as it doesn't involve depending on others. Just yourself and your preparations.
> It's a problem with no guaranteed solution.
You can bet they're considering AI killbots as a possible "solution" to the "hostile bodyguard" problem...
Fortunately AI still can't compare to human intellegence. So they are just putting a target on their back, advertising that there is a prize inside.
Why beat someone where some negative consequences are likely to follow, if the same person can give you immunity to infinitely beat and extort large group of people only for your pleasure and at your whim? This is called society.
The answer is really what power is: people willing to do something for you. This very much did happen multiple times in history what you describe. A legion of roman soldiers uplifting their general to the status of emperor and marching on rome is a common theme in history. Mob bosses realizing they have enough support from other capos to take out the don and run the operation. Maybe that holds up, maybe that doesn't. Power is sometimes quite loosely held in history. There are people who claimed title of Emperor of Rome for less than a month. It can very much be like a game of Juggernaught in Halo.
It has happened a few times in history, e.g. the French revolution and the Bolshevik revolution.
However once they killed the "elite" or "oppressor" they couldn't stop the killing, and kept redefining who the "oppressor" was, until it was anyone who had one more cow than the rest.
Those are not good examples. OP is asking about things like military coups, where the seizure of power comes from within the existing establishment.
>"Something I've always wondered: What keeps the guards and thugs of the ""elite"" from just killing the elite and taking their money?"
Read Leviathan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)
The answer is easy: The others did the work. Until the party was over and the money spent. The more interesting question is: why has so much from the Victorian era survived in Britain to this day, whilst it disappeared in most other countries?