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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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. 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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".
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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”
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
But you also have the thing like the East India Company which is essentially a government by itself.
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 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.
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.
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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"
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You can’t have a bourgeoisie without a mass of petit-bourgeoisie making sure no proletariat ever forgets their class
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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.
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.
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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?
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.
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Someone’s never heard of regulatory capture
And to get a promotion in the army you had to buy it.
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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.
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"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.
> 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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
> 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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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> 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.
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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.
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> 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.
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Huge pools of money got Trump elected, not sure what youre talking about.
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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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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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?
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"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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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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."
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.
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?
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!
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.
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other than the fact that success is mostly just luck (and lack of morality), not hard work.
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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.
> 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.
> 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
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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.
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> 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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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Who thought understanding, in depth, the fundamental bases of their legal system was a good idea?
the clergy.
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.
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.
(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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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Because they exploited the rest.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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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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.
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”
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
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> 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.
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?
Slavery and Imperialism money.
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).
Ideal state of capitalism: a few ultra rich, and many categories of slaves.
Victorian elites lived in a capitalist country in a world full of statists. It's economics. The Dutch were there before.
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.
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?
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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.
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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...
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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.
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.
>"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)
Ctrl+f “slaves” 0 matches
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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.
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?