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.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Sadly, i dare say in the US, except for advancements in Medical, disabled vets have a somewhat rough time these days :(
Probably not as bad as Byfield, but compared to the standard of living now to back then, probably not that different when matched against the general population.
100% disabled vets in America get a tax free allowance of $4,000 a month, plus free medical care, plus a great deal of support including full free college to pursue the possibility of employment, which won’t reduce the disability pay at all.
I’d say America is taking care of them pretty well compared to Dickensian conditions.
Experiences with VA can be wildly different.
Disability can be easy or hard to get, depending on which generation you got injured in and whether or not they think you're playing it up. I've heard both people saying that they were pushed to claim disability when they didn't actually need it, as well as men who definitely needed it getting turned down.
Actual health care at the VA can be really uneven too. A friend of mine got a knee injury and was basically given a three month supply of an addictive painkiller and told to go sit at home and take however much he wanted.
What do you think happens to a young man in his prime who is stuck glued to a couch other than sit around playing video games drunk all day addicted to painkillers?
Well, in his case at least, he managed to get off of them and turn himself around before it became too destructive, but the lack of care he was shown by the doctors put him at significant risk for permanent harm.
I've heard other horror stories, and stories of nothing but praise as well. YMMV.
I know a guy who retired from the Air Force and got 100% disability that included tinnitus, ptsd, and something about his joints. This person was an aircraft maintainer and never saw combat, although he was deployed a few times. The lady evaluating his case really hooked him up, he brags bout it all the time. He gets retirement and disability.
There are reddits, discords, and even companies that assist vets in working the system. many of whom never got close to deployment and were never combat arms. If you're persistent you'll get paid. As a combat vet it makes me sick.
Both this and the earlier post emphasize the lack of combat deployments in the examples. I should think disability would cover any service-related injury.
Then there are those veterans who live under a tarp on the sidewalk along the VA campus in West LA. Not everyone is doing alright.
I’m a 100% P&T veteran from the Iraq war and you have no idea what you’re talking about so stop
Even this bullshit response is exactly what the author discussed
Disdain and contempt for servicemembers who fought, were hurt or maimed in wars
Could you provide a material rebuttal instead of insulting the author? The USG provides a generous disability package for disabled veterans that are in no real sense disabled, even.
I mean you demonstrate exactly why that is a disingenuous question directly.
So again, ironic, given the topic context
i watch Caleb Hammers financial audit show on youtube and while I'm sure it's not all accurate, every single veteran they have on that show (keep in mind these are people with money iasues) who without exception get a package that would qualify as a part time salary, many get more than a full salary and often work other jobs. The system is healthy
What leads you to dare say that?
> It had been assumed that Byfield died around 1850, but O'Keeffe's discovery of the veteran's 1851 memoir, along with additional evidence from newspapers and archives, adds new chapters to his astonishing life story.
I hate to be obnoxious, but what O'Keeffe did was happen upon a rare book in a small library the he recognized had been written by a semi-famous author. Instead of scanning it (or having it scanned) and putting it on archive.org, then writing his article, he's actively concealing these "new chapters" from the world. My assumption is that he's planning to put it into print in order to make a few bucks.
According to the Google Books entry (which I don't quite trust, because why would there be a Google Books entry?), it's 80 pages, so he'll either have to write a hefty introduction of what seems to be a story about a disabled vet talking about Jesus, or he'll combine the war narrative and the post-war narrative (both obviously long out of copyright) into a single volume and hawk that, and the article he's written will be the introduction.
I guess I advise him to self-publish and to make sure to also target Christian bookstores rather than just academic libraries? Survey a brick and mortar Christian bookstore of possible and get an idea about what covers sell?
Isn't this the book?
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/61f15583-612e-4ea5-aa...
Victorian 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-par...
I 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
Your graph is rather misleading: you adjust for inflation in two different ways to get 'real' data. One series uses CPI, the other uses the implicit price deflator for gross domestic product.
You can avoid this problem, by plotting nominal values and looking at their ratios. The price level will naturally cancel out.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1QI7c is a graph of the ratio of your two deflators (arbitrarily normalised to 1980 Jan 1 equal 100.)
As you can see, it trends up over time. Meaning that CPI grows faster than the GDP price deflator.
This is one reason I graphed them as indexed values. You're not comparing the 'real' inflation adjusted values, but the independent indexed value, relative to a fixed point in time, for both.
> I think something modern times should emphasize more than ever is that what matters
A while ago the Economist pointed out that one of the Rothschilds died of an illness that would today be easily curable with antibiotics, but at that time the cure could not be bought at any price.
I mean, this is a recurring theme of John Green's "Everything is Tuberculosis"
TB is "just" a bacterial infection. Today, in a wealthy industrialized country with universal healthcare, if I caught TB they'd "just" cure it here. Cures are possible, often even relatively easy.
But all three of the famous Bronte sisters probably died from it (TB == "consumption"), not far from where my mother lives today in that same industrialized country. And most years today it is still the leading cause of infectious disease deaths because even though we could cure it we just leave poor people to die instead.
What do you consider high quality? I would say they are one of the higher quality news papers of the world. Not everything, but overall yes.
I do not agree with their political views, but I can say the same about most papers. To a large degree this site is also beginning to be troublesome politically.
Nathan Mayer Rothschild probably died of staphylococcal or streptococcal septicaemia, either from the abscess or secondary contamination from the surgeon’s knife. Today that infection would almost certainly be cured with standard antibiotics.
No offence intended but wavefunction is very low-quality.
We have more necessary expenses, but the cost of computers, phones, and phone plans is so low. The expensive stuff is rent, transportation, food, childcare, and healthcare.
If a historian is going to uncover personal accounts from 2026, then they’ll be full of people who are struggling to make ends meet but are still drowning in a sea of inexpensive consumer electronics.
The expenses you're mentioning were also present in the past. Their cost or percent of revenue cost may have increased but this is covered ostensibly by inflation measurements. But the introduction of entirely new defacto necessities is not covered.
Of course inflation measurements are also flawed but that once again gets back into the broad point about how the reality of people is so much more relevant than any given number, especially once those numbers become seen as a goal to maximize, at any cost.
Wow, 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.
You are using two different inflation measures in the original graph.
>Victorian England was the richest country in the world by GDP per capita
It was extremely unevenly distributed though.
How many vacuum cleaners is a hansom cab?
I 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.
Check out 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.
It’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.
If 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.
Implicit 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.
Or 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 and source https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3231742601...
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. 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.
Yep.
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.
Dire poverty by modern standards, sure. But the 19th century saw a spectacular rise in living standards even for average Britons. The literacy rate in Britain was ~60% for men and 40% for women in 1800, by the end of the century it was near universal for both genders. Life expectancy at birth rose from ~40 to 50. Median wages rose, too, climbing ~50% from 1800 to 1850 (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Real-wages-during-the-pe...).
It is simultaneously true that the average Briton (arguably wealthy Britons, too) in 1900 lived in abject poverty compared to 2025, and the 19th century saw one of the fastest rises in living standards in Britain even among average Britons.
You’ve rather missed my point. I’m not saying nothing improved. I’m saying the imperial profits didn’t go to the people doing the dying for empire.
50% wage growth over fifty years whilst Britain’s running the largest empire in history? Compare that to the United States over the same period. The US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever. If imperial profits were trickling down, you’d expect Britain to outpace non-imperial industrialising nations. It didn’t, if anything it was worse.
The literacy and life expectancy gains you’re citing came from industrialisation and public health reforms, not imperial dividends. Meanwhile the landed gentry who actually controlled the imperial trade were getting obscenely wealthy.
Life expectancy of 50 in 1900 still meant working-class Londoners in overcrowded tenements with open sewers, whilst their supposed countrymen lived in townhouses with servants. The Victorian poor saw industrial revolution gains, not imperial ones.
Asset inflation going into non-productive assets like land or monopoly privileges. Tech monopolies are famous example of this, which is why they're large percentage of the SP500.
Most loans are for land, which mean your banking system isn't directing loans toward productive assets which increase economic activity.
So, no, the mechanism didn't change FMPOV.
> Which tells you everything you need to know about who was actually pocketing the imperial profits
No, not really. Britain did not exist in isolation. Economic growth was generally very slow in the 1800s.
So you need to compare Britain with its peers like France or Germany in both periods.
Everyone bringing this up is missing the point entirely.
I thought people would be able to “get” it on their own so I didn’t bother replying but you’re the fourth person, so let me help you understand.
Britain had 1/3rd of the fucking planet, including an active workforce and their accumulated generational assets.
The US had: barely arable farmland, the trials and tribulations of european settlers are well documented.
Yet wages went up more in one of these, and not the one that was controlling 1/3rd of the planet.
I'm fairly sure statisticians know about history and account for it.
The Empire wasn't profitable.
Quite a different situation. An empire is when you go to a populated place and extract wealth from the people who live there. That’s not what manifest destiny was. America expanded into land that was sparsely populated by natives americans and mexico who had no wealth to extract.
You’re absolutely correct. The UK built an empire because it industrialized early and had the money and technology to do so. But the empire isn’t what made it rich in the first place.
> The US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever.
Um. Weren't they carving one out of the American West? I mean, there were people there beforehand... it feels like a not-dissimilar situation.
Was that due to the british empire, or was that broadly happening across the western world during that same time period?
Britain was much richer per capita than every other major European country and almost all smaller ones. Whether that was because of its much bigger industrial sector or its enpire is debatable.
How is that instructive? The British empire was mostly gone by the 1950s and a hell of a lot happened after that. It would be more instructive to look at Britain just before WW1 compared to the other countries.
At their peak, virtually all of the aforementioned empires brought enormous wealth to the homeland. It might not be profitable in the long run, but the long run can mean centuries before it becomes a net negative.
Also, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were part of a Danish empire at one point.
> Wealthiest countries in Europe: Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, San Marino, Sweden.
Microstates and tax havens account for half that list, which grossly distorts wealth measurements. Such as Apple Europe being accounted for in Ireland.
The rest: (Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden); former kingdom of Denmark, also Hanseatic League? Apart from the brief period around 1700 at the height of the Swedish Empire, none of these count as imperial powers and did not have overseas empires.
Netherlands: had a substantial navy and overseas trading empire, although not as big area-wise as the UK. Probably more cost-effective as a result.
> Britain, Russia, Spain, France, Portugal, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Belgium
What happened here is that all the great empires spent all their money and a vast quantity of human lives fighting each other to the death. Twice. I suppose Spain and Portugal collapsed on their own to ineffective dictators.
(special "fuck Belgium" entry here for just how brutal the small Belgian empire was; Belgian occupation of the Congo cost more lives than the Holocaust)
Wasn't the literacy rate in New England substantially higher than the literacy rate in Old England, both in 1800 and in the years prior to its declaration of independence?
New England had a male literacy rate of around 70% compared to Britain's 60% in 1800. But New England was one of the most literate regions in America around the time of the founding, including the other American regions into the literacy rate would bring the literacy rate down (even more so when if one includes the enslaved population). Comparing the literacy rate one specific region of one country, to the national average of another country is comparing apples to oranges.
But the important thing is, the 1900 Britain's male literacy rate was 97%. Illiteracy went from something that was fairly common to exceptionally rare.
One could argue that they privatized the profits and socialized the costs. The costs being the army, navy and to a lesser extent an army of colonial administrators. You can see a similar shape in the decision to end slavery in 1833 by, essentially, buying it out. The money for that buyout had to come from somewhere.
(I'm not a historian, I've no idea how well this idea would stand up to scrutiny).
You seem to be implying that the landed gentry financially benefited from the Empire?
Sounds pretty much like today
A poor person today has a better standard of living than a rich person in the 1700s
That 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
Everybody now has antibiotics, oral contraception, machines to preserve and cook food, clean, heat your home, pass messages and put on music and plays in your living room.
Who now needs dozens of personal physicians (practicing 19thC medicine!), prostitutes, cooks, maids, messenger boys and musicians?
Poor people have hundreds of servants, they're just robotic: a dishwasher, a laundry washer, a water heater, a door announcer, a courier who can travel at the speed of light, etc.
The dire urban poverty was so much better than the pre-industrial rural poverty that nearly half of Great Britain moved from the countryside to a city during that period.
You see the exact same patterns in India and China today.
Not quite. There was more work in the cities, but living conditions were more cramped and pollution was rife.
You can second-guess their decision all you want but they voted with their feet
>You’re hitting a crucial paradox
AI?
Just curious
No, just trying to open friendly.
I sweated over the opening for 5 minutes because I didn’t want to go in really hard with “don’t you know most brits had it bad ackshulee!”- because I’m one of those generationally poverty-stricken brits and it hits a bit too close to home to sound neutral.
Removed it; I’m getting flagged regardless, I might as well own it.
I'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.
Luckily in the US there is no poverty, as their GDP is so enormous
Imperialism is expensive, so it's generally only profitable once exploitation of the local population has been maximised.
I'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.
It’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-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.”
I 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.
I 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.
That'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.
That 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.
Colonialism arguably ruined the Spanish economy.
IR Systems Realism is bullshit.
Yeah? Whats a better model?
The discussion was about redcoat era Britain.
The physics of anarchy hasnt changed.
This sounds like a bunch of lazy stereotypes, especially the bits about bragging and entertainment. (I would agree with the line about not being imperial for their people.)
The British empire was an aftereffect of a long power struggle of several European countries, which was, for its participants, way more existential than you admit it to be. Look at the Seven Year War, the first truly global war in history. France, England, Prussia, Russia, Austria etc. stood to lose a lot if they lost decisively, and were strongly incentivized to improve their militaries and navies to prevent precisely that.
The same scenario was replayed during the Napoleonic wars. One power eventually emerged victorious, it now had the best navy in the world and no peer competitor left. (It was also gripped by dangerous internal struggles, google "Peterloo".) That is a situation with a single person having a lot of hammers and the rest of the world looking like a nail park.
And 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.
You 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 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) 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.