For better picture of what made Britain successful during this era look to folks like Isa Brunel... son of a French Revolutionary immigrant who was poor enough for debtors prison, but skilled enough in engineering and math to build some of the largest ships in the world.
Last week I worked up this one-liner: "Great Britain extracted the wealth of a vast empire, far less wealth than might have been created, pissed most of it away through bad domestic policy, and transferred the rest to the USA to pay for one-and-a-half world wars."
A failure to reinvest in domestic industrial tech; a painfully high-value currency; and low-mobility economic stratification. History does love its rhyming slams.
Like the movie says, if they could have created wealth, they would have created wealth.
Where and when this happens are often accidents or confluences of history and geography.
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... makes a very good argument that the Industrial Revolution could only have begun in England. (EDIT: I wrote "Europe" earlier)
In the medieval era travel and communication were slow enough that being behind on technology wasn't too bad because there was time to catch up before someone conquered you. In the modern era that was no longer the case. If you've ever played a historical strategy game you know what I'm talking about.
Additionally India and China were the wealthiest regions of the pre-industrial world. There's a reason Europeans went there instead of them going to Europe. They had things Europeans wanted, rather than the other way around.
I mean maybe you could say the industrial revolution could only have happened in Britain, but that's awfully hard to prove. It also wasn't a pre-cursor to a lot of the empire.
Like 200 years before that. India produced a quarter of the world's manufacturing output in 1750. [1] It was already prosperous when the British got there. That's why the British were there.
You're really going to tell me that if the British hadn't conquered them, they wouldn't have rapidly adopted the industrial revolution? Why not? Japan did.
> It also wasn't a pre-cursor to a lot of the empire
I don't know what that means. Britain's navy and army, as well as its advanced capital markets, were key to conquering so much of the world. Industrial capacity is fundamental to a strong navy and army in the modern world. Advanced capital markets generally develop to support industrial growth.
Why not? Their technology is part of what helped them conquer so much in the first place. What would make them so hostile to technology?
All 3 societies were among the leading powers of the world up until the 1800s, in addition to being productive and prosperous.
That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies, both in refusing to adopting the superior European technology and by continuing to oppress their own people to such a degree that their people didn't really care much about a foreign power replacing their old tyrants.
Agree. But that's exactly my point: they were prosperous pre-colonization. The point at which this thread started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50004651 argues that these places were incapable of creating prosperity and needed Europeans to teach them. That is simply incorrect and kind of racist.
They faltered at the wrong point in history and got colonized (or in China's case, merely bossed around - if that's inaccurate, sorry I'm not strong on Chinese history). As a result they lost out on a century of industrial, economic, cultural, and social growth and reform that happened in Europe.
You only have to look at Japan - never colonized, adopted Western technology and ideas organically, is economically advanced today - to see the counterfactual.
Although in a sense, Great Britain itself is not dissimilar in that it was conquered by Normans (descendants of quasinomadic Vikings)
They would likely follow a similar path as Russia or Japan, Russia is pretty far from western Europe already so ideas took longer to get there so they modernized much later, and we can see how that turned out. Russia being so oppressive and rotten were very vulnerable to any sort of modern ideology and fell to communism, that sort of transition was inevitable for these countries, Russia tried to delay it and it was forced upon them, Japan saw the writing on the wall and made the transition deliberately etc.
It wasn't the lack of arms or interest in arms, it was the lack of development of the sciences which had to flow through the patronage of those in authority. Britain had Newton and Newton co-invented calculus. The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery and higher precision manufacturing that by the Victorian Era could not be matched by Chinese or Indian workshops. The wealthy gentleman scientist and natural philosopher culture that developed the galvanic pile, the pressure cooker, astronomical telescopes, and the microscope was not something that could develop organically in these Eastern countries due to the political makeup of these empires (largely driven by descendants of nomadic warlords)
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... See this for why the steam engine was invented where it was.
> The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery and higher precision manufacturing that by the Victorian Era could not be matched by Chinese or Indian workshops
By the Victorian Era India, at least, had substantially de-industrialized due to colonial policy.
> The wealthy gentleman scientist and natural philosopher culture that developed the galvanic pile, the pressure cooker, astronomical telescopes, and the microscope was not something that could develop organically in these Eastern countries
Why did they have to develop them organically? Europeans didn't invent gunpowder or algebra or the counting system.
It's hard for us to understand this today, but science as we know it did not really exist back then in either England or anywhere else.
The invention of gunpowder in China came about from searching for an elixer of immortality. The original book on Al-Jabr was written for practical purposes in the 9th century, around the time when the foremost scholars of the Islamic Age (See Al Ghazali) would argue that ascribing the origin of the universe to a chain of cause and effect rather than the direct action of God was a form of atheism and therefore apostasy.
Europe wasn't really any better in this regards even in the 17th century. Isaac Newton himself spent the vast majority of his career working on alchemy and searching for the Philosopher Stone which he believed was harbored in the Book of Revelations.
It took decades, and the generation after Isaac Newton to begin to adopt the philosophy that many natural phenomena could be ascribed to mechanical laws (like the physics of Newton), and it's from that philosophical foundation that led to the invention of "science"
I don't think that's correct; the end of Empire was the two world wars. Much of the empire didn't leave until the late 40s/early 50s.
The world wars were a crisis that caused change, but that is a bit like going bankrupt. Just because the crisis is fast doesn't stop the process being slow.
That feels like retrofitting a modern frame onto a very different situation? I don't think any of the European elites thought in terms of "the power of Europe" as any kind of unified front vs the rest of the world until after they lost the world wars. It was intra-European conflict as it always had been. England/France/Germany(+)/Spain/Austria against each other; those elites that were unhappy with the fallout of the last great redistribution of power at the Treaty of Utrecht.
(there's probably a chunk of history I'm missing as to how Russia went from enemy of Britain at the Crimean war in the 1850s to the ally in the Triple Entente which caused France and Britain to go to war with Austria-Hungary; but WW1 is definitely not the fault of the any kind of British elite, we can blame it on the Austrians and, of course, the Serbs and ultimately one guy with a gun)
The rest of the world wasn't conceived of as independent powers until the Russo-Japanese war. They were prizes to be allocated among the (European) players. At that time, it was even conceivable that the European powers might take and divide China as they had done with Africa and India.
(+) strictly, Prussia; remember German and Italian unification happened during the Victorian era.
What, the British weren't up the challenge of forecasting a major war in Europe might end badly for them? I mean, I'm sure their leadership didn't, but that is why they don't get to run an empire any more.
> but WW1 is definitely not the fault of the any kind of British elite, we can blame it on the Austrians and, of course, the Serbs and ultimately one guy with a gun
It looks a lot like the fault of the British elite. They failed to use their influence to get a positive result in Europe; which descended into a bonfire over 40 years until it ran out of fuel to burn and half the continent was under the thrall of communism. And if they were doing something productive in the mean time overseas it didn't deliver much result. There'd be an argument that their laissez faire attitude was a problem except they kept actively declaring war on Germany over and over until their empire fell apart.
That generation of British leadership demonstrated no capacity to get positive results apart from a remarkably swift decommissioning of the largest empire ever built. I suppose history can remember them in the positive light that as group they could have failed even worse except they at least had the good sense to bring in US management before the situation became unrecoverable.
The generations BEFORE the Victorian Era enabled it excesses. People who were born IN the Victorian Era (which this article seems to argue were responsible for Britain's success) formed the leadership caste of Britain's ultimate downfall in the World Wars.
Substantial influence. The fact that America's rich are constantly mobilizing to promote or defeat ballot measures and candidates shows the limits of their power.
By design. That's what separation of powers–and the division of power–is intended to do.
Why is populism doing so well on the right? Is that what the pools of money want?
I think it is. It’s hard to believe Musk doesn’t want China tariffs and he loves the hard right agenda. Those like Thiel have some deeply dubious views.
But it’s not so much the political views as the opportunity that exists at the moment. Give Trump enough money and you can do what you like.
It's doing well on both sides. The Republican Party was just more willing to compromise its values to give them power. The debate over electability in the Democratic Party, on the other hand, is taking longer to manifest, but is probably going to result in far fitter candidates than e.g. Ken Paxton.