Comment by cafebeen
1 day ago
Seems like an accurate picture of the Victorian elite, but it sounds like they were optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked. That was success "on their own terms," as the article puts it, but not something to emulate.
Depends who you mean by the elite.
The aristocracy, certainly.
The upper middle class (i.e. professional class - I know other countries define these things differently) that provided the administrators were just good at their jobs and worked hard. Leonard Woolf's autobiography is a great insider view. Histories of the period too.
The upper middle class were decidedly not elite at that time and very much "working class plus"
Still are, arguably. Dependent on earnings rather than wealth.
They did have a lot of privileges, especially when employed in the colonies.
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You can’t have a bourgeoisie without a mass of petit-bourgeoisie making sure no proletariat ever forgets their class
Rent seeking how? As the article says, most government positions were unpaid and to be an MP required paying all your own election expenses out of pocket, which were huge. They did it for the prestige and social rewards, not financial. Landowners were expected to take on government roles, also for free.
Until the 1830s the British elections at least were openly corrupt, the system of 'Rotten Boroughs' meant the makeup of Parliament was still essentially mediaeval into the early industrial era. You had absolutely mad situations where Manchester sent nobody to Parliament, but an old village which had literally fallen into the sea long before still sent two MPs.
Fascinatingly bizarre. More info: https://ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/features/rotten-boroughs/
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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.
You're asserting a lot of things that aren't in the article. If you want to argue Victorian-era MPs were all motivated by corruption then go ahead but you'll need to cite strong evidence for that, because the general consensus was that MPs of that time were not particularly corrupt. As the article says, they didn't even spend much time on lawmaking at all, so there wasn't a lot of legislation to abuse.
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The problem is the counter-examples. We have dysfunctional cleptocracies worldwide. They go nowhere. Last of all, they do not conquer- and transfer there money outside towards high-trust societies. Thus by the empire they conquered- they can not have been as corrupt as the others. If the machine you build kills it- you can not have eaten that machine faster than it produces pocket butter.
Someone’s never heard of regulatory capture
And to get a promotion in the army you had to buy it.
I don't know why this was downvoted, the practice of purchasing commissions in the army was only abolished halfway through Victoria's reign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...
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.
Not in the least. Today in the US less than 1% of the population works as home service. In victorian England it was around 10%.
The US is a powerful "empire", but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.
As the variably attributed proverb goes, "The sun never sets on the British Empire, because God doesn't trust the English in the dark"
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I'm not sure that demonstrates anything. That just demonstrates that people work different jobs than they did back then; it doesn't tell us anything about wealth distribution.
21% of US jobs are service occupations. All you've really done is establish that cars exist so the wealthy have deemed it no longer necessary to allow filthy peasants to live in their mansions.
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Nowadays service jobs are externalized. Try to compare how big chunk of the population are in service industries now and then.
Back then they had a private coachman and now you have an independent contractor with the Uber app.
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what a strange rebuttal to the observably true fact that wealth disparity today is very similar to victorian and french revolution times, as the parent was saying.
> the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed
the word "powerful" isn't really a great choice, because no empire has had the reach of ability as the USA. The USA also used soft power much more effectively, even if the UK reigned over more people.
Per capita largest, maybe? At one point, 1/4 in people in the world were UK subjects.
Almost nobody works in "home service"
But I can get a cleaner twice a week, grab an Uber whenever I want to drive me wherever I want, have professional chefs cook for me every evening via food delivery services, etc etc
That's an unusual measure -- and I like it. I wonder what those percentages are in very wealthy communities in America, e.g. Greenwich and surroundings, Nantucket, Hamptons plus labor communities west.
>but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.
Interesting to see this popular myth still being regurgitated when someone as perceptive as Bertrand Russell who lived through part of it admitted it was self-aggrandizing propaganda. In truth 80% of the British "Empire" were impoverished Indians. While back at home the Blue Books were churning out shocking reports of the misery and physical state of the British working class compared to their American and European peers. Read the archives from the early 20th century for a real eye-opener. And to top it all off, the "rule the waves" trope when Britain lost the Battle of the Chesapeake, aka the one naval battle that truly mattered in its history.
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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.
Correction: they did put sugar in absolutely everything. Vast quantities of it. Read up on Demerara sometime.
That leaves vegetable oils, and cars. I think it's like 70/30 personally.
But they drank a lot of alcohol ...
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.
The timing doesn't work. In the US, obesity didn't start taking off until the 1970s and 1980s, and the motorcar was ubiquitous long before that.
mass obesity is a product of people eating unhealthy. i have access to plenty of luxuries compared to the rest of the world, and even America, yet my BMI is about ~20. individuals are responsible for being fat.
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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.
In most corporations, most of the work is not done by the CEO. Yet a good or bad CEO can still have a big impact.
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This whole article is not about the aristocracy.
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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.
You will fall out of it just as easily
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?