Comment by gampleman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gampleman | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't also quite give the numbers to say how effective they actually were. By modern standards the amount of people actually governing the empire was tiny. For instance the colonial office (the bit in London that administered the colonies centrally) had 14 staff in 1816, and grew to about 25 by 1850 [1]. The total colonial service including most overseas posts (except India and a few others) was about 1000 people by 1900, the Indian civil service was never more than ~1200. This over an empire of ~450 million subjects.

By contrast today's Civil service is about 550,000 governing a population of 69 million [3]. Of course it must be pointed out that todays government does more things for better or worse, so it's not saying they did the same with a few orders of magnitude fewer people. But still, seems pretty effective to me.

[1]: Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815–1830: "At the Colonial Office in 1816, there was a tiny establishment of 14: the Secretary of State, Earl Bathurst, his Under Secretary, Henry Goulburn, MP, the Permanent Secretary, a librarian, a translator and nine clerks. According to Goulburn, 'several' of the clerks were employed on slavery-law enforcement duties all the time. The enforcement of the antislavery law seems to have had priority over any other policy objective."

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_Service

[3]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/civil-service-stati...

For instance the colonial office (the bit in London that administered the colonies centrally) had 14 staff in 1816, and grew to about 25 by 1850

Important context:

1. The Colonial Service never administered India, the biggest colony.

2. Lot of these colonies had representative institutions of their own. "We have 43 colonies, and not 50, 60, or 70, as has been variously stated; 27 of these have representative institutions, some in a higher degree of perfection than others, no doubt, but the whole have representative institutions, including Canada, New Brunswick, Jamaica, Antigua, Barbadoes, and all the minor West Indian colonies." [0]

[0]: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1849-04-16/debates/807...

> 1. The Colonial Service never administered India, the biggest colony.

And by that point the East India Company had one of the largest armies on earth.

It wasn’t that their administration was effective, it just didn’t care what happened as long as the plunder rolled in. It was backed by the largest Navy in the world and largest private army, which allowed it to devolve most functions to local puppets which implemented them brutally (and why the EIC was eventually nationalized). For example the Mughal bureaucracy alone was massive and they just coopted it, as long as they had the means to physically enforce their control.

The proximate cause of nationalization of EIC was the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.

But you also have the thing like the East India Company which is essentially a government by itself.

The size of any given bureaucracy has little to do with the work load as demonstrated by Parkinson in the 1950s.

Ruling in the 1800s when firearms were orders of magnitude more expensive than today was an entirely different game than doing so in a world of mass consumption.

Divide and conquer in a world where the pony express is the fastest channel and telegraphs were the almost exclusive to the banking system and selected government agencies was still possible. Now high school students can coordinate nationally via social media. Look at the consequences of Arab spring 2011 still reverberating.

In a way, Victorian elites were much more effective relative the the helplessness of civil society at a time when people would be counted as highly mobile if they had a bicycle and could routinely travel to a few more villages than their grand parents had ever seen in their lifetimes.

The Victorian era, 1837-1901 roughly overlapped the rail era - first railway 1804 in Cornwall, "railway mania" 1840s which was a railway stock bubble and crash.

>The mania reached its zenith in 1846, when 263 Acts of Parliament for setting up new railway companies were passed, with the proposed routes totalling 9,500 miles (15,300 km). About a third of the railways authorised were never built...

Somewhat reminiscent of our current AI boom. At least the Victorian one seemed to lead on to prosperity so fingers crossed.

Prosperity for who? Not for the colonies.

The greatest feat of the ruthless British empire was the great number of independency holidays around the world.

I'm not that up on the details but a lot of the former British empire like the US, Canada, Australia etc. are doing quite well. I was in Hong Kong in the 1980s and it did much better then under UK government than the mainland. Not sure about places like India. Ireland wasn't that great.

Singapore and even India too.

It’s complicated, because while yes the British were bastards, unlike some of the powers they weren’t completely rapacious, and recognized that at least a modicum of self sufficiency and good governance was necessary for them to have something to steal long term.

The French, Spanish, or (big yikes) Belgian colonies have had significantly harder times.

Kind of a ‘what did the Roman’s ever do for us?’ situation.

I get the impression a lot of the success was just providing some sort of rule of law and military security and then letting markets do their thing along the lines of Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market. (Scot who did some study at Oxford and died in 1790).

Sounds like at least a modicum of good governance to me.

The approach from most of the others (especially Belgian) more closely resembled strip mining.

The government that governs best governs least.

The old British Empire was hardly a an exemplar of free market economics. There were many independent companies but there were also chartered monopolies and price controls. We take basic economics for granted today but back then many leaders literally didn't understand the basics of how it worked.

It doesn't take that many people to perform rent extraction -- you can have an entire country run by one absentee landlord so long as you can pay the local police to maintain order for you. Obviously the counterfactual is not available to us, but the colonial administration presided over the deaths of tens of millions due to disease and famine. Some of that is unavoidable tragedy, but quite a lot of it is direct mismanagement (especially fervent devotion to a "work sets you free" mindset and free market capitalism).

> 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.

I feel like not counting the military is silly in that case, because the military in colonies was essentially involved in police actions, engineering duties, and ensuring administrative rules were followed.

As an essential part of the colony, you can't really count them out. That's similar to how in feudal structures, and military regimes, I'd count the military and civil service as one entity.

>Some of that is unavoidable tragedy, but quite a lot of it is direct mismanagement (especially fervent devotion to a "work sets you free" mindset and free market capitalism).

It was all going so well until you spewed propaganda, believe it not the provinces administered by the British were least affected by disease and famine primarily because of the infrastructure and institutions that'd been established in them. Additionally, we have a better insight into those regions because of the record keeping again introduced by the bureaucracy forced upon them...

You just have to look at past colonies today in india to still see the positive impact they had. To this very day all proper and impressive buildings are the ones build back then, sadly they are all slowly falling apart because of lack of care and maintenance by the locals.

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