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Comment by tempfile | Hacker News Reader

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).

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> 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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