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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 in the history of the world. And their people lived in squalor in London.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Are you saying that because there is much more stuff to buy, like an internet connection, that the quality of life is lower? I mean sure after you factor out all the inexpensive / free entertainment, unlimited access to information, incredibly cheep clothing, lighting and consumer goods, vaccines etc life is so much worse than in the 1950’s
>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.
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.
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.
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.”
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...
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.
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).
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.
Sounds pretty much like today
>You’re hitting a crucial paradox
AI?
Just curious
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.
> 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.’
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agree! 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.
China, 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.
Luckily in the US there is no poverty, as their GDP is so enormous
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.
Imperialism is expensive, so it's generally only profitable once exploitation of the local population has been maximised.
> 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...
Indeed. Don't think anything is being "concealed"! The rediscovered memoir has been transcribed and made available at the link posted above, while the full research seems to be available without a paywall here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-british-s...
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.
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
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 do you believe is not accurate about it?
I believe that the people on his show are real and have the money issues they claim. But I also believe that his crew select for sensationalism. You aren't ever going to see someone who the system is genuinely fucking over on his show. They will not invite that guest on. They only invite people on who have done colossally stupid shit and could be getting their shit together if they weren't complete fucking doorknobs.
There are more than enough idiots in the world to keep his channel going for at least a couple of years.
What leads you to dare say that?
When young, I saw the a few vets coming back from Vietnam, one I knew, and they were having a very hard time getting help.