Comment by xinuc
1 day ago
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.
1 day ago
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.
World War I killed so many victorian elites off and destroyed their culture because it proved honor culture inferior to industrialized killing
WW1 was nearly a generation after Victoria's death.
*inferior to industrialized versions of ancient cultures. The Victorians essentially gave up all sense of their medieval culture (Longbowmen and archer traditions, Yeoman farmers) for immense wealth and new luxuries (Tea, tea houses, Opium, and lots of parties).
This led to their decline within 200 years, compared to China or the Roman Empire. The Chinese had to deal with the incompetent Qing, but luckily they survived as a culture, and learned a lot from Deng Xiaoping.
> cruelty isn’t inherently profitable
agreed. But it takes tremendous amounts of stupidity to not be profitable while cruelly exploiting millions of people and their resources.
Exploiting people and resources is a terrible way to be extremely profitable; it's very inefficient.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
This is why economics is called "the dismal science"; slaveowners got mad that economists told them having slaves was inefficient and decided the economists were bores.
other than the fact that success is mostly just luck (and lack of morality), not hard work.
I wouldn't say there was a relative lack of morality compared to other elites. Quite the opposite actually.
I don't know man.
The great famine of Ireland, The great famine of India, and even The late Victorian Holocaust is a thing.
It is also well documented where other empire wanted to help the starving people, but denied because it would make them looked bad.
I really can not see that they are not lack of morality.
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