Not in the least. Today in the US less than 1% of the population works as home service. In victorian England it was around 10%.
The US is a powerful "empire", but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.
The US is a powerful "empire", but the UK is the most powerful Empire to ever have existed.
But at the same time, it was the irony of life that while I could afford a car, I could not afford a maid."
- Agatha Christie
> 21% of US jobs are service occupations.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says:
> Service-Providing Industries: Account for roughly 80% to 81% of total U.S. employment, covering fields such as healthcare, education, retail, hospitality, finance, and professional/business services.Back then they had a private coachman and now you have an independent contractor with the Uber app.
the word "powerful" isn't really a great choice, because no empire has had the reach of ability as the USA. The USA also used soft power much more effectively, even if the UK reigned over more people.
Per capita largest, maybe? At one point, 1/4 in people in the world were UK subjects.
> The USA also used soft power much more effectively
Soft power was absolutely important before World War II. Obviously. Was that the claim you’re referring to? Because I didn’t say anything about before World War II.
And no, it’s not something you can easily create a precise metric for. But many historians agree that America was extremely effective.
Good god!
I genuinely choked on a mouthfull of tea reading this!
But I can get a cleaner twice a week, grab an Uber whenever I want to drive me wherever I want, have professional chefs cook for me every evening via food delivery services, etc etc
From that same blog post, they mentioned an excellent data source: "The World Inequality Database". Check this link[2] to compare historical "Top 1% net personal wealth share" for USA vs France vs UK. Hint: After the page loads, you need to drag the green slider at the bottom of the chart to the far left. Then you can see back to 1800. It is wild how unequal Victorian Britan was compared to anything today: Top 1% owned 68% of wealth!
[1] https://populareconomics.substack.com/p/is-wealth-inequality...
[2] https://wid.world/world/#shweal_p99p100_z/US;FR;WO-PPP;GB/la...
Interesting to see this popular myth still being regurgitated when someone as perceptive as Bertrand Russell who lived through part of it admitted it was self-aggrandizing propaganda. In truth 80% of the British "Empire" were impoverished Indians. While back at home the Blue Books were churning out shocking reports of the misery and physical state of the British working class compared to their American and European peers. Read the archives from the early 20th century for a real eye-opener. And to top it all off, the "rule the waves" trope when Britain lost the Battle of the Chesapeake, aka the one naval battle that truly mattered in its history.
Chesapeake, on the other hand, sealed the birth of a world-changing nation.
Also regarding Chesapeake, Britain’s century of hegemony came afterwards. Trafalgar came afterwards, and mattered a lot. Losing that battle doesn’t mean the navy wasn’t globally dominant in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
What’s the Bertrand Russell quote?
You can list a long series of reasons why they were weak and crap, ackshually. But presumably plenty about them was also not weak and crap otherwise they wouldn’t have ended up the global hegemon for a century. Certainly in terms of global trade dominance, at their peak nobody in history has come close, not China and not the USA.
From memory, it was something about the English belief that their naval supremacy was like "a law of nature", only to have it shattered in one day by a country with little naval history (Germany). Together with the equally short-lived delusion that "the whole world would become exactly like England".
And I don't know why you chose such a misleading metric as wages rather than actual living standards of the British working class as late as 1919. From McClure's Magazine:
>Every European visitor who has traveled through the United States has commented upon the stature of men and women in our factory towns as opposed to the factory classes in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and Leeds. The Blue Book Reports of the British Parliament have stressed the number of British working men with dwarfed physique. Investigation shows an abnormal number of young men whose optic nerve was so imperfect they could not see the sights of a rifle; whose auditory nerve was weak; whose vital force was not sufficient to develop enamel upon the teeth; whose heart action was feeble and whose respiration was sub-normal. British students find the explanation in dark tenements, insufficient food, want of playgrounds where boys and girls could excercise and build their bodies, in child labor, in pregnant women who worked up to within a month of their confinement.
Yes, the bad teeth stereotype might be a living residual of these severe deficiencies (you can still see it in many parts of post-USSR Eastern Europe as well). And before you claim it was any better in the 19th century, know that there's an entire scholarly field devoted to the miseries of the Victorian proletariat.
The truth is, Britain simply did not have the wealth to accommodate its population tripling in size in the span of a few decades. You can still get a sense of this struggling working class feel today by walking through just about any English town and looking at its endless rows of compact, gloomy-looking houses and people.
>Britain's century of hegemony came afterwards
Another popular misuse of the term hegemony that's in line with the retrospective aggrandizement I mentioned earlier. It suits the monolithic power held by some ancient Greek city-states over their neighbors (whether economic, military or cultural), but not the power and influence Britain had to share with France through much of the the 19th century in the colonial world.
You can find evidence for this flawed retrospection in the modern and recurring (mis)characterizations of former British influence. For example, the alleged dominance of the British Pound among central banks (when in reality most international transactions were still settled in bullions, while half the world was effectively using the French-based LMU); its predominant role in abolishing slavery through prosecution of slave-ships (which hardly affected the US and was only accomplished with the willing participation of the French Republic); its central role in the dissemination of cultural and scientific publications (despite surveys showing that in 1870 French was by far the dominant language for global publications in agriculture, applied sciences, commerce, industry and technology). Remember that it was post-WW1 America that helped English replace French as the lingua franca, not the UK. There's a reason Disraeli was still speaking in French with Russian diplomats in 1877. That's not what a "world hegemon" does, and using such exaggerations does a serious disservice to history.
Probably not European, British workers were very well paid by continental standards (cost of living was higher though). If you want an example of pure exploitative capitalism where workers were reduced to near serfdom there is Belgium.
See my reply to jjtwixman above which rebukes this misleading metric. In fact, the cited account is particularly telling in that it is made in comparison to continental standards.
So in a way, germany got its wish- the french and british empire where no more after 2 world wars.
Incidentally there was no greater period of free trade in human history than under British hegemony. Even the US has not pursued unilateral free trade.
India had a whole thing about that freedom of trade. The wheel in the flag is a symbol of not wanting to participate in that sort of free trade the british empire offered.
With all due respect, this is Americentric nonsense. If you had to rank the most important British naval battles obviously Trafalgar is at the top. The Nile, Jutland, and even arguably the Armada campaign are also much more important.