Comment by gretzquee
4 hours ago
> 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.
We are indeed not counting the people doing the work. The colonial office does not include the actual administration of the country, that is kind of the whole point of my comment.
I apologize for misreading your comment then.
I am in the process of reading the volume on India for the Oxford History of the British Empire.
In early modern academia, "Historia" was defined as opposed to "Philosophia" as being the study of the particular versus that of generalizations.
One thing that my experience in studying history at a major European university showed me is that almost any generalization one makes about any period in history can be disproved. There is a lot of complexity in the development of path dependent evolution and irreversible processes that simply cannot be compressed and modeled.
That's comparable to the Victorian elites' situation, where they only count people directly employed by the home office, and ignore the so called independent colonial administration as if it's a completely different category of human.
Are they not also Victorian Elites, or did they lose that status by not being in Britain?
Above we are counting them. This about ~10000 people total, most of them abroad. We are not counting military since these are civil servants, but neither are we counting military today.