"Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically."

> There is a longstanding view that the prosperity of Britain’s elites came at the cost of the hundreds of millions whom they subordinated and oppressed, and no doubt that is at least partly true. But on their own terms, the British ruling class enjoyed a victorious century.

> Maybe the Victorian elite succeeded in spite of being feckless and incompetent: the Industrial Revolution created great wealth, which they enjoyed passively and parasitically. We cannot run controlled experiments on Victorian Britain, so this thesis is hard to test. But I want to explore the possibility that a relentless focus on soft skills, team building, and intra-elite networking actually worked rather well.

The essay is intentionally exploring an alternative to the obvious one. I think the essay does brush off the cruelty of the empire too quickly, but cruelty isn’t inherently profitable, so there’s still some explaining to do.

The industries in Britain had access to such huge monopolistic markets, so not really a surprise.

In most cases, the indigenous populations signed their rights away first through clever negotiation and the British Empire subsequently used force to enforce its contractual rights. Over time, the companies themselves could not muster sufficient force to maintain status quo as they relied mainly on meceranries who could only be sourced from thd local populations and were notoriously fickle, so the Crown inevitably took charge.