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I get they are fictional, but what strikes me from typical Victorian England proletariat dramas... Is that the British empire at the time had the largest empire
by AtlasBarfed 9mo ago
I get they are fictional, but what strikes me from typical Victorian England proletariat dramas... Is that the British empire at the time had the largest empire in the history of the world. And their people lived in squalor in London.
- bsder 9mo agoAnd the conditions for their vaunted military (both army and navy) was as bad or worse. A trip to the Fusilier Museum in the Tower of London really drove that home. Being a soldier absolutely sucked until pretty much the 20th century.
- gerdesj 9mo agoYou might like to note that Florence Nightingale largely invented the concept of effective treatment of broken soldiers and she was from these parts. You might like to ask this chap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Weston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Weston about being burned on a ship as a soldier many 1000 miles away from home. The thing about history is that it is remote until it is personal. My dad was a soldier (so was mum but she left to marry dad, because that was an "option" in the '60s). We lived in West Germany quite a lot and the LSLs (Landing Ship Logistic): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFA_Sir_Galahad_(1966) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFA_Sir_Galahad_(1966) were an option for travel to and fro' the UK. Me and my brother were teenagers at the time. The cooks on the LSLs were Chinese (Honkers - Hong Kong) and inveterate gamblers. I don't recall all the crew being Chinese as the wiki article says. After dinner, "pud" (sweet/pudding) was often apple fritters with syrup. Me and my brother had quite an appetite and my mum told me later that the cooks would bet on how many bowls of apple fritters we would demolish. Another thing I remember from the LSLs is that the tables had a ring around the edge about 1" high and very sticky table mats. They were flat bottomed, being designed to run up a beach, which had no chance because they were pretty old by the '80s. In any sort of a sea they pitched and yawed and made you wish you were a better person! Despite all that, one made it to the Falklands and died horribly along with a fair few soldiers. Galahad was actually one of the later ones. Lancelot was an old one and would never have managed the journey.
- gerdesj 9mo agoI'd give the dramas a miss mate and stick to boring old history or efforts to try and describe what happened in the past, with evidence. This article is in the second camp. The article is describing an "early" veteran's struggle to deal with being disabled in a war and how society treats them. London isn't mentioned at all.
- moomoo11 9mo agoThat's because any "Empire" is the extension of the ruler's ego. They weren't being imperial for their people. It was so they could brag to other royals and rulers that their kingdom was bigger. The people were resources and toys for the rulers' entertainment.
- PlatoIsADisease 9mo agoThat isnt how international relations works. Lesson based on contemporary IR Systems Realism: >Great powers are forced to manage the international system, or become a client of a great power. There are benefits to being a great power. >When 1 great power builds weapons, everyone else is forced to too. This is called the Arms Race. >Colonialism is one example of the Arms Race. If you didn't join the party, you were going to lose. >Great powers put international politics above domestic politics. Its why we see the US do things like spend heavily on the military and get involved in unpopular wars.
- asdff 9mo agoColonialism arguably ruined the Spanish economy.
- moomoo11 9mo agoThe discussion was about redcoat era Britain.
- PlatoIsADisease 9mo agoThe physics of anarchy hasnt changed.
- MrJobbo 9mo agoIR Systems Realism is bullshit.
- PlatoIsADisease 9mo agoYeah? Whats a better model?
- tempest_ 9mo agoI mean you can only judge squalor if you also talk about how other people in capitals that were not London lived. Relative squalor might have been nice comparatively, or not, I have no idea. Plenty of poor people in the US yet people still go there.
- FridayoLeary 9mo agoI've never heard anyone suggest that Britain should have focused on improving conditions at home before engaging in empire building. I always assumed the two were not mutually dependent. The expenses in running an empire probably paid for itself and no doubt returned a lot on the initial investment (after all the whole point of having an empire is to secure better trading). Meanwhile the conditions in the cities were a separate problem, and one which was hard to fix quickly given the population explosion and the Industrial Revolution. All of which to say, is while you raise an excellent point all the evidence i've seen suggests the two are entirely unrelated projects. If anything increasing globalisation in the long term increased prosperity for everyone involved (just not necessarily by equal amounts) and vastly improved conditions. If anyone has a counterpoint, by which i mean historical complaints or serious academic analysis, i'm happy to hear. None of this is a moral judgement on the relative evils and merits of empires and Victorian England, which is not the topic, just my opinion of why from a practical standpoint one has very little to do with the other.
- rayiner 9mo agoIt’s not at all clear the costs of running the empire were outweighed by the benefits: https://iea.org.uk/media/empire-and-slavery-did-not-make-britain-rich-finds-new-iea-book/ https://iea.org.uk/media/empire-and-slavery-did-not-make-bri... “The book highlights that most of Britain’s economic growth in the imperial period did not come from its colonies. Trade only accounted for about a quarter of economic output, and most of that trade was with Western Europe and North America — not the Empire. For that reason alone, the Empire cannot have been the decisive factor explaining domestic investment and later wealth.”
- Khaine 9mo agoI think this misses something fundamental. Most of the colonies Britain created until the race for Africa were to support the Navy. During the 16th century they were efforts to create colonies to support trade (i.e. North America, India). Britain then needed a strong navy to support its merchant vessels who sold English goods all over the world, and bought goods from all over the world to Britain. Which is why colonies like the cape were created. It is this growth in merchants that brought riches. Those riches would not have lasted without a Navy to protect the merchants from piracy or privateers. Colonies were not originally intended to be profitable, they were way points for ships to stock up on goods, water, men, etc. Leaders in those colonies on their own initiatives then looked to expand the colonies to make themselves a big name.
- dijit 9mo agoYep. Britain controlled the largest empire in history, yet most of its own population lived in dire poverty. I don’t believe this was accidental. Imperial profits flowed almost entirely to a small propertied class (the landed gentry). The working classes.. who provided the soldiers, sailors, and labour.. saw virtually none of it whilst living in squalor. Before 1918, most British men couldn’t vote at all; franchise was tied to property ownership. When we discuss ‘the British Empire,’ we’re largely describing the actions and enrichment of perhaps 3-5% of the British population. Most Britons today can trace their ancestry back through generations of poverty and disenfranchisement, not imperial beneficiaries. It’s an important distinction that’s often lost in broader discussions of imperial responsibility, as if those who are generationally impoverished should share guilt.
- arthurcolle 9mo agoSounds pretty much like today
- bandrami 9mo agoA poor person today has a better standard of living than a rich person in the 1700s
- defrost 9mo agoThat seems improbable unless they, say, own hundreds of slaves, travel extensively in Europe, never want for food or alcohol, own multiple houses, etc. Eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Manigault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Manigault
- randallsquared 9mo agoMachinery, computers, and the internet do more than hundreds of slaves/servants worth of work (how many musicians and actors would have to be at your call to replicate YouTube, which is free?). A poor person in Europe can still travel all over the Eurozone by train, etc. In the first world, we pivoted to "food insecurity" instead of "hunger", but the most common signifier of being food insecure is obesity: more food and alcohol than a person should want, at least. The only one that is a definite downgrade among those you list is the lack of owned houses and/or land.
- strken 9mo agoI would be interested in hearing an actual historian's opinion on whether conditions were better or worse in England at the height of the British Empire, compared to continental Europe. I got the impression from Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London that English workhouses near the end of their life were basically the predecessor of the modern homeless shelter, where visitors would get a single night of accommodation by law. The conditions a century earlier seem to have been truly hellish and tantamount to slavery. I have no idea whether either was better or worse than the rest of the world at the time.
- physicsguy 9mo agoIt’s well known that living conditions went down for the average person as they moved into cities and industrialised. So the average living condition of someone living in London for e.g. being lower than that of a farmer in a country less far along on the industrialisation journey isn’t that surprising really.
- wqaatwt 9mo agoIf you had land yes. For a landless laborer in a rural area the conditions weren’t necessarily that great either. Of course population growth played a significant factor too.
- eru 9mo agoCheck out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_France to see how much better the Brits had it than the French. Many of the accounts in the book are drawn from British working class _tourists_. Ordinary people in Britain had enough disposable income to visit France.
- rayiner 9mo agoVictorian England was the richest country in the world by GDP per capita. But the world was just very poor before the industrial revolution: a per-capita GDP around $900. By 1800 England was more than double that. Today almost every country is richer than England was in 1800: https://www.broadstreet.blog/p/how-the-world-became-rich-part-i https://www.broadstreet.blog/p/how-the-world-became-rich-par...
- jojobas 9mo agoHow many vacuum cleaners is a hansom cab?
- somenameforme 9mo agoI think something modern times should emphasize more than ever is that what matters is the lifestyle of the people. Here's [1] a fun graph I just threw together. That's real GDP/capita and real wages graphed alongside each other, both indexed (at 100) to the start date when real median earnings began being measured by by the Fed, which is 1979. Since 1979 real GDP/capita is up 117% while real wages are up 12%. And if you consider that modern times has far more necessary expenses that often involve rent (internet, computing devices, etc) then it's quite likely that real median wages are down since 1979 in terms of how much money the average person has left to themselves at the end of each month. Even without these adjustments it's likely that real wages today are lower in absolute terms than they were in the 50s as by 1979 inflation had already started getting out of control. The point of this all is that I don't think the numbers mean much of anything. And that's assuming you could even reliably measure them - you cannot. Go back into reconstructing 19th century data and earlier and you're going to rely on assumptions where the degree of uncertainty is much higher than the differences over time you're trying to assess. So I think far more informative than numbers are personal accounts. How did people live? Of course there's a literacy bias there, but even such accounts will shed light on the illiterate. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1QHEN https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1QHEN
- Retric 9mo agoWow, being that deceptive implies your argument is false. You imply there some something different around that date, but only show data prior to that date for one of those lines. WTF. Dig a little deeper and the median wage is calculated by literally asking people roughly what they make and changing the methodology in 1994. Health insurance alone is a big difference in the ratio of people’s nominal wages and their actual incomes between those dates.
- hexbin010 9mo agoLuckily in the US there is no poverty, as their GDP is so enormous
- RobotToaster 9mo agoImperialism is expensive, so it's generally only profitable once exploitation of the local population has been maximised.
- everdrive 9mo agoImplicit in your statement is the assumption that the purpose of a government is to maximize the well-being of all of its citizens. This is a somewhat new idea, and shouldn't be taken for granted when we look at historical situations.
- mapt 9mo agoOr geographical situations. The UK serves dramatically better in that capacity than the US does at present. Thing is, though... even the parts of Western history that aren't remembered as atrocities by modern standards were pretty thick with them. For example, thousands of homeless London orphans were enslaved and sent to the early American colonies for the crime of being homeless orphans, and very few of their names are recorded in subsequent colonial documents, so the assumption is that almost all of them died before reaching adulthood. Adult convict slaves commanded very low prices relative to African slaves, and children that weren't as effective laborers, and with fewer rights, were likely seen as burdens. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs and source https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=32317426018&dest=usa https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3231742601...
- hermitcrab 9mo agoI believe that it was generally held at the time (by the rich anyway), that the poor were poor because of some sort of defect of character. Not because of lack of access to education and other resources. It is an idea that is super appealing to the rich and seems to be making a comeback.
- lostlogin 9mo ago> I believe that it was generally held at the time (by the rich anyway), that the poor were poor because of some sort of defect of character. I’ve always assumed that this is why tax cuts for the rich are acceptable to voters. ‘I’m not defective and lazy like those poors. I’m going to be rich soon and don’t want high taxes when I get there.’
- kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 9mo agoChina, Russia, USA in <current year> Empires have always had poor people in their capitals. I guess the effect was more pronounced back then because the industrial revolution was also happening.
- infecto 9mo agoAgree! The one thing that stood out to me watching KBurns new documentary was at the time most British could not own land. You had royalty a class of landowners and then the commoners and commoners had no real means of upward mobility. Compared to the colonies at the time which had the highest literacy rate and much more mobility between classes than Britain.