Sinking ships and the wheel of history

Chappo trap house is reviewing Lachmann, Richard. First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers. Verso Books, 2020. The book uses binary tables to make its arguments – and it is a pleasure to read. An example is the one below. Notice how we have fewer samples than required to exhaust the search space. What I find interesting is how elite-heavy his account it. Contrast with Schweitzer’s ideas on “interim ethics” and Christianity on brining down the Roman elites.

C = high level of elite conflict in metropole, A = high level of colonial elite autonomy from metropole, U = unitary elite dominant in metropole, I = lack infrastructural capacity to control colonial elites