Also Pages also has a fairly decent print design mode. Sure, it can't compete with something like Indesign in feature parity, but I find it pretty useful to do posters, booklets, flyers and the like. It's free and fairly intuitive to use.
Doesn't this just prove the OP's point? The government gets as much money from the top 0.1% as it does from the bottom 50% means that it is getting a lot of their money from the wealthy.
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."
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]
> 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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Except this tends to only get really "interesting" at the top. That's because the middle layers can call on their peers or even on their superiors in times of crisis. Hence peasant rebellions basically never succeed, since their aristocrats will simply apply to the king or to their peers to help them crush it.
But the king has no superiors and even his peers are not quite as much available, so the politicking at that level gets much less stable.
Generally speaking countries that have tried to do something about their abysmal birth rates (Hungary, Czechia, etc) by putting in substantial economic incentives (i.e. 4 years of maternity, free accomodation, etc), have found that it moved the needle very little and certainly there can't be much talk of reversing the trend.
Also, I believe that our culture of over-parenting (and therefore many of the associated costs) is a _consequence_ of having fewer children, not the cause. If you put all your reproductive eggs in one basket, you are motivated to overprotect them. That makes a culture of (at least from a historical perspective) insane parenting demands that simply don't scale.
The problem with the "richer countries have fewer kids" correlation is that it implies causation, but I think it's more sensible to say it the other way: "having fewer kids makes you richer" (at least temporarily, before the demographic collapse makes you poor again, but that will likely not be your problem).
Jury duty is a bit of an example of that working in practice. Generally speaking (at least in my jurisdiction) in theory you can't refuse jury duty just because you don't want to do it. However, in practice the system does allow a large array of excuses (as concessions to practicality I suppose) that you may take, and generally the burden of proof for those excuses is pretty light.
For instance you could be excused based on your employer sending a letter that it would be inconvenient to their business if they lost you, etc.
So in practice, you can probably wiggle out of it if you simply don't want to do it, by finding a suitable excuse.
Another system where random service is still commonly used is military draft. That seems significantly more hardened against dodging (since the cost on the individual of going with it is drastically higher).
So generally, it seems that where current societies do use random sampling to select people for service, there is always an element of compulsion, but how "hard" it really is varies.
This is clearly written from a western Christian view. It should be noted for completeness that the Eastern Orthodox Church still uses the Septuagint (in Greek speaking churches in the original, in others with suitable translations thereof; in English I like https://www.amazon.co.uk/Orthodox-Study-Bible-OE-Some-NKJV/d...).
I’d be curious to know if this difference in scriptural base also contributed to the great schism?
I think the schism happened for several reasons, none of which I can personally account. If people really want to dig in, the subreddit r/academicbiblical is full of well, academics and people who know their stuff.
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