Comment by qwytw

> 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.