Other comments suggest that Franklin would have eventually gotten there on her own. Her work was key to the discovery as we know it, which wouldn't have happened without it. To me, that's the whole story.
On the last supposition: they've managed something better for themselves, which is an order where they have substantial control over public policy without being subject to the full brunt of public inquiry or responsibility. You would have to force Sam Altman to run for office; Oprah famously laughs when questioned about pursuing the presidency.
The article tries to imply this system 'worked', but Britain alreadt had an intercontinental colonial empire for 150 years prior to the Victorian era. Massive technological and scientific advances like the steam engine and calculus preceded the Victorian era. The hedonistic generation of leadership that came out of this era basically lost it all.
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.
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.
India was already conquered by the Moguls by the time the British got there, so I guess they had to consolidate their own colonisation before looking to extend.
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.
> India was already conquered by the Moguls by the time the British got there
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.
China, India, and most of the Middle East had effectively been conquered by descendants of horseback quasi-nomadic peoples at the start of the British colonial era. The Qing Dynasty (Manchurians), the Mughals (descendants of Tamerlane and the Mongol aristocracy of Genghis Khan), and the Ottoman Turks (former vassals to the Mongolian Ilkhanate and also Tamerlane). It can be argued these Central Asian warlord societies were not conducive to technological development.
It wasn't universally due to lack of interest in guns (although in the Qing case, they actually did pull back on the use of firearms due to how poorly both the Ming Dynasty and Dzungar Mongols fared with the matchlock weapons of that era against strategic deployment of Qing horseback archery). India had an enormous arms manufacturing industry that included usage of rocket artillery, Timur absolutely loved using cannons, Ottoman matchlocks were considered the best in the world and even exported to China from the 1500s onward.
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)
> 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.
I think Bill Bryson writes about this much better than I can, but in short, European political fragmentation and nascent capitalism meant that educated polymaths could offer their services to different landed aristocratic or royal patrons. Brahe and Kepler fall into those categories. So does Gauss and Euler. The creation of the Royal Society in 1660 created the venue for exploring Natural Philosophy... what ultimately became "science". It was in this atmosphere that Newton was able to publish the Principia (1687)
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"
That they lost control to some guys that had to travel around entire Africa to get there shows how incompetent and backwards thinking they were. It would be impossible to conquer 100m happy and productive people with just 1000 people even if the 1000 had a bit better guns, especially since the 100m happy and productive people easily could just reproduce the new modern guns.
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.
> That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies
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.
Technically India and China were both conquered by Central Asian Warlord societies before Europeans arrived. In India's case by the descendants of Timur, and in China's case due to severe political and environmental issues at the end of the Ming Dynasty. These warlords arguably had even fewer resources and greater militarism than later European conquerors
That was centuries before European colonization began. They recovered, and by the 18th century, were the most prosperous, productive regions of the world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50009485
I see your point, yeah they would manage without others going in and bossing them around. They had everything in place to transition to a modern society unlike some of the less developed parts of the world, so Europeans meddling with them didn't really help.
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.
The article mentions Churchill who was a major leader in both world wars. He also served as a lancer at the Battle of Omduran and grew up during the time of Empire born smack dab in the middle of the Victorian Era (1870s). His generation formed the leadership of the empire during that period.
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.
The British Empire controlled something like ~20% of the world and other European powers were adding in 10% here and there. Probably more than that weighted by economic and military strength. It is kinda on the British elite that the world wars even started. Even with the most charitable read we're talking about a situation where the message was "lets not break the power of Europe" and they couldn't sell it to Europe.
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.
> Even with the most charitable read we're talking about a situation where the message was "lets not break the power of Europe" and they couldn't sell it to Europe.
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.
Ww1 and ww2 had a lot to do with Germans lusting after British Imperial greatness (having missed out on large colonization due to lack of national cohesion prior to 1870)
> That feels like retrofitting a modern frame onto a very different situation?
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 Industrial Revolution was caused by capitalism. As other countries liberalized their economies, the British Empire faded. Even worse, the UK became more socialist over time.
> where they have substantial control over public policy
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.
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.
> 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.
In 2016, Clinton spent $576.4 million and Trump spent $332.4 million. In 2024, total spending including PACs was $1.6B for Biden/Harris and $1.1B for Trump. There was less money behind Trump both times.
Eventually. In the meantime, here in the human socioeconomic sphere, you might be dealing primarily with the Second Rule of Fight Club and Operation Mayhem.
>It would be simpler for the US govt to build such a search engine like that today as google was a lot simpler back then, however it wouldn’t work because the internet has changed as much as Google has.
You're targeting the efficacy, not the means. Google reached almost every page, served dynamically or not, with metadata and cache freely viewable, and served a relevant slice based on the actual search query that was actually submitted. We can do that again. It would piss off a lot of platform owners. I don't care. I want it back. Fuck Zuck.
It's suggestion not a instruction, and It's a certainly a more useful suggestion than a bunch of people make demands of google and the US govt that will never be realised.
> We can do that again. It would piss off a lot of platform owners
Fair, stuff is more locked down now and stuff is harder to crawl. But if we're entering intervention then you may as well entertain idea's closer to what has been political feasible in the past, like requiring google to provide metered API access to this archived data to train competitors, like how AT&T also was required to license UNIX patents to others looking to build software on its systems. Its closer inline to what anti trusts in the past have accomplished.
The problem with nationalising google and making it free is, operating google for free just isn't feasible. Google provides a free service because it elevates their paid services and users on it provides value to their other services. Even with a feature freeze google still crawls the web and collects information to improve its results which has an on going marginal cost. Say it happens, you nationalise Google Search. how long till the elected officals who just see the on going costs (and not costs avoided) starts complaining about how much keeping it operation costs? The political economy isn't feasible either.
If you want to improve search, I think its best to start with addressing entry barriers, which in this case is massive fixed costs.
>Information retrieval has never been closer to the ideal of: "ask a question -> get the answer".
Again, for people who actually used the internet in 2010, I don't believe this is a real sentiment.
OR
It's never really been farther, either.
It is especially so the farther you stray from things the average person wants to know. The beauty of Old Internet and Old Google was that it connected you with niche experts, and quickly, instead of a hyper-compressed bag of guardrails quasi-possibility (if you have enough credits) over a grueling campaign of "placate the robot's idiosyncrasies".
Do you know what inspired this post? A 10-minute odyssey of asking Google Search's AI for help finding a particular option on a particular website. Every response after the first began with, "My mistake, you're right," and at the end, I still didn't have the answer.
I don't know what level of conflict of interest one has to have to claim with a straight face that Google Search results are anywhere near as good as they were years ago, for the user. Now, for Google's business interests? I'd buy that they're far and away more fantastic (for shoving ads down the throats of users and manipulating them).
Sounds like projection on your part. When Google actually strove to provide results that were relevant to the user, and provided robust filtering tools, SEO spam was not a problem for me, personally. Most who were around then will tell you the same. Using Google felt like having a super power, with even cute nickname for such an ability - Google-fu. No one says they have Google-full anymore; they fight a system warped to sell you things (products, services, ideologies), to a degree that's way worse than back then.
If you thought it was a golden age back then, you must just not have been able to keep up. Google "made a deal" with SEO about 10 years ago and those elements basically run it now (enshittification via aligned interests).
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