Important context:

1. The Colonial Service never administered India, the biggest colony.

2. Lot of these colonies had representative institutions of their own. "We have 43 colonies, and not 50, 60, or 70, as has been variously stated; 27 of these have representative institutions, some in a higher degree of perfection than others, no doubt, but the whole have representative institutions, including Canada, New Brunswick, Jamaica, Antigua, Barbadoes, and all the minor West Indian colonies." [0]

[0]: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1849-04-16/debates/807...

And by that point the East India Company had one of the largest armies on earth.

It wasn’t that their administration was effective, it just didn’t care what happened as long as the plunder rolled in. It was backed by the largest Navy in the world and largest private army, which allowed it to devolve most functions to local puppets which implemented them brutally (and why the EIC was eventually nationalized). For example the Mughal bureaucracy alone was massive and they just coopted it, as long as they had the means to physically enforce their control.

Ruling in the 1800s when firearms were orders of magnitude more expensive than today was an entirely different game than doing so in a world of mass consumption.

Divide and conquer in a world where the pony express is the fastest channel and telegraphs were the almost exclusive to the banking system and selected government agencies was still possible. Now high school students can coordinate nationally via social media. Look at the consequences of Arab spring 2011 still reverberating.

In a way, Victorian elites were much more effective relative the the helplessness of civil society at a time when people would be counted as highly mobile if they had a bicycle and could routinely travel to a few more villages than their grand parents had ever seen in their lifetimes.

>The mania reached its zenith in 1846, when 263 Acts of Parliament for setting up new railway companies were passed, with the proposed routes totalling 9,500 miles (15,300 km). About a third of the railways authorised were never built...

Somewhat reminiscent of our current AI boom. At least the Victorian one seemed to lead on to prosperity so fingers crossed.

The greatest feat of the ruthless British empire was the great number of independency holidays around the world.

It’s complicated, because while yes the British were bastards, unlike some of the powers they weren’t completely rapacious, and recognized that at least a modicum of self sufficiency and good governance was necessary for them to have something to steal long term.

The French, Spanish, or (big yikes) Belgian colonies have had significantly harder times.

Kind of a ‘what did the Roman’s ever do for us?’ situation.

The approach from most of the others (especially Belgian) more closely resembled strip mining.

A lack of resources useful to industry didn’t help. The industrial revolution didn’t benefit everyone equally.

If you don't count the people doing the work, it indeed looks like you don't need as many people to do the work.

In your scenario order and rent extraction is not being maintained by an absentee landlord at all then.

I am in the process of reading the volume on India for the Oxford History of the British Empire.

In early modern academia, "Historia" was defined as opposed to "Philosophia" as being the study of the particular versus that of generalizations.

One thing that my experience in studying history at a major European university showed me is that almost any generalization one makes about any period in history can be disproved. There is a lot of complexity in the development of path dependent evolution and irreversible processes that simply cannot be compressed and modeled.

Are they not also Victorian Elites, or did they lose that status by not being in Britain?

As an essential part of the colony, you can't really count them out. That's similar to how in feudal structures, and military regimes, I'd count the military and civil service as one entity.

It was all going so well until you spewed propaganda, believe it not the provinces administered by the British were least affected by disease and famine primarily because of the infrastructure and institutions that'd been established in them. Additionally, we have a better insight into those regions because of the record keeping again introduced by the bureaucracy forced upon them...