Comment by jimbo456
1 day ago
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.
1 day ago
Insane that this whole thing never mentions once the legions of servants who did their laundry, cooked their food, poured their Port and generally did all the work.
Because it was not any different from any other aristocracy in the world at the time. The question the article is trying to answer is "why Britain?" Of all the competing european empires what made that particular one especially successful?
Britain had large amount of colonies and therefore access to a large market. The markets were designed to extract wealth, see for e.g. https://averyreview.com/issues/57/empire-salt-tax
The industries in Britain had access to such huge monopolistic markets, so not really a surprise.
> Britain had large amount of colonies
This is just a restatement of "they were successful". Yes, but why?
Britain was the largest empire in history and covered 25% of the Earth's surface area. What was it which allowed them to become the largest empire in history?
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I love comments like this... they say "well like just build amazon, easy as that"
Yeah but why did they have the biggest and best empire in history?
The legal framework was a big part of the puzzle. Britain's lawyers and legal system were head and shoulders above their peers. Colonies and companies in charge were controlled by complex legal contracts guaranteeing profits to those in charge, from the Crown down.
In most cases, the indigenous populations signed their rights away first through clever negotiation and the companies subsequently used force to enforce their contractual rights. Over time, the companies themselves could not muster sufficient force to maintain status quo as they relied mainly on mecenaries who could only be sourced from the local populations and were notoriously fickle, so the Crown inevitably took charge.
The Industrial Revolution hugely increased production and improved logistics.
The Navy was the best in the world.
There was a capitalist investment culture which linked elements of the aristocracy with inventors and traders, so ventures were relatively easy to fund.
The Royal Society helped spread scientific research and insights.
Private military ventures like the East India Company were closely linked to the state and 'too big to fail' (at least for a while.)
The educational system produced administrators, adventurers, soldiers, and politicians with an unshakeable, almost cult-like, sense of patriotic entitlement.
Britain was isolated physically, which meant the possibility of a distracting land war stopped being a risk after Waterloo, and sea war more or less after Trafalgar.
Basically England was a mature nation state with stable borders and a workable (if brutal and very imperfect) investment-oriented economy, while the other European powers were still fighting each other and - in many cases - trying to self-organise a national identity.
The UK, not England!
The article says.the education they received was less rigorous than schools in France, Germany or Italy. Despite this and the educational focus on the classics Britain made huge contributions to science and technology. Maybe schools did not matter that much educationally, but did, as you say, create loyalty and character.
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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.
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.
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.
> Insane that this whole thing never mentions once the legions of servants ...
OK but we're talking about a period where the UK was the world's first superpower.
I understand you want to portray the despicable conditions of servants living in rich people's houses in Victorian britain but...
Wanna have a talk about the living conditions of people in, say, Eritrea at the same time? (Eritrea has never really been colonized btw so the whole "it's because of colonialism" angle doesn't really work).
Or even just the living conditions of poor people in Britain who happened to not have jobs as servants for the rich?
My great-uncle (a radiologist) and my great-aunt (she had a pharmacy) had a servant during a bit part of their lives, Tess: and she was basically part of the family. Sure she did the laundry and cooking and cleaning but she never struck me as some oppressed human being living in misery. What I remember from visiting them was my uncle in his office, always working (analyzing radio from patients, writing (snail) mails to other doctors, etc.) and Tess always working too: just a different kind of work.
People getting paid to work for other people doesn't imply slavery. We could of course also have a talk about actual slavery, what were the last countries to officially abolish it, who were the biggest slavers in the world, which countries still have actual slaves (and sex slaves) today, etc.
I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.
Countries in their industrial era are quite literally not unlike third world countries.
England at its Victorian era looks like an overpowered Brazil than anything even close resembling the US now.
> I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.
Indeed not. Being in service provided one of the most desirable careers you could hope for as a working class Victorian. When your options look like pit, mill, or factory, cleaning floors in a nice warm house is a good alternative. And that was just the foot in the door: there was progression available. Those jobs were hard to get, prestigious, came with their own status hierarchy, and could keep you set for life.
This isn't completely true. Some of them got so little sunlight that they developed illnesses as a result.
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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.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine^H^H^H^H cricket, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans^H^H^H^H^H British ever done for us?
Brought peace!
Yes, before the British arrived none of these colonies experienced famine and were in effect a cross between the Garden of Eden and an Ewok village.
Perhaps not blaming everyone else for their misfortune also helped the British succeed?
It did mention the colonial empire up near the beginning.
> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.
> Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well.
The essay is intentionally exploring an alternative to the obvious one. I think the essay does brush off the cruelty of the empire too quickly, but cruelty isn’t inherently profitable, so there’s still some explaining to do.
World War I killed so many victorian elites off and destroyed their culture because it proved honor culture inferior to industrialized killing
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> cruelty isn’t inherently profitable
agreed. But it takes tremendous amounts of stupidity to not be profitable while cruelly exploiting millions of people and their resources.
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other than the fact that success is mostly just luck (and lack of morality), not hard work.
I wouldn't say there was a relative lack of morality compared to other elites. Quite the opposite actually.
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