Why were Victorian elites so effective?

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.

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.

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...

>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.

The US is a powerful "empire", but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.

-- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically."

> 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.

Brought peace!

Perhaps not blaming everyone else for their misfortune also helped the British succeed?

The industries in Britain had access to such huge monopolistic markets, so not really a surprise.

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 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.

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.

England at its Victorian era looks like an overpowered Brazil than anything even close resembling the US now.

He didn’t do very well in his 7 minutes in politics, so maybe that’s part of it.

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.

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.

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

Spent my childhood at boarding school having my head stuffed full of Latin and Greek. Forgotten all of it.

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.

The prestige also accrued because it was the language of the educated in Europe for a long time.

Why do you think all animal species have a latin name? You think the ancient romans classified them?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

Dunno. Just feels like it reinforces my view unfortunately. But a good call out anyway.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_indenture_system

You can bet they're considering AI killbots as a possible "solution" to the "hostile bodyguard" problem...

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.