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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bureaucracy | 3/6 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:50:13.694575+00:00 | kb-cron |
==== Ashanti Empire ==== The government of the Ashanti Empire was built upon a sophisticated bureaucracy in Kumasi, with separate ministries which saw to the handling of state affairs. Ashanti's Foreign Office was based in Kumasi. Despite the small size of the office, it allowed the state to pursue complex negotiations with foreign powers. The Office was divided into departments that handled Ashanti relations separately with the British, French, Dutch, and Arabs. Scholars of Ashanti history, such as Larry Yarak and Ivor Wilkes, disagree over the power of this sophisticated bureaucracy in comparison to the Asantehene. However, both scholars agree that it was a sign of a highly developed government with a complex system of checks and balances.
==== United Kingdom ====
Instead of the inefficient and often corrupt system of tax farming that prevailed in absolutist states such as France, the Exchequer was able to exert control over the entire system of tax revenue and government expenditure. By the late 18th century, the ratio of fiscal bureaucracy to population in Britain was approximately 1 in 1300, almost four times larger than the second most heavily bureaucratized nation, France. Thomas Taylor Meadows, Britain's consul in Guangzhou, argued in his Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China (1847) that "the long duration of the Chinese empire is solely and altogether owing to the good government which consists in the advancement of men of talent and merit only", and that the British must reform their civil service by making the institution meritocratic. Influenced by the ancient Chinese imperial examination, the Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854 recommended that recruitment should be on the basis of merit determined through competitive examination, candidates should have a solid general education to enable inter-departmental transfers, and promotion should be through achievement rather than "preferment, patronage, or purchase". This led to implementation of His Majesty's Civil Service as a systematic, meritocratic civil service bureaucracy. In the British civil service, just as it was in China, entrance to the civil service was usually based on a general education in ancient classics, which similarly gave bureaucrats greater prestige. The Cambridge-Oxford ideal of the civil service was identical to the Confucian ideal of a general education in world affairs through humanism. Well into the 20th century, classics, literature, history and language remained heavily favoured in British civil service examinations. In the period of 1925–1935, 67 percent of British civil service entrants consisted of such graduates. Like the Chinese model's consideration of personal values, the British model also took personal physique and character into account.
==== France ==== Like the British, the development of French bureaucracy was influenced by the Chinese system. Under King Louis XIV, the old nobility had neither power nor political influence, their only privilege being exemption from taxes. The dissatisfied noblemen complained about this "unnatural" state of affairs, and discovered similarities between absolute monarchy and bureaucratic despotism. With the translation of Confucian texts during the Enlightenment, the concept of a meritocracy reached intellectuals in the West, who saw it as an alternative to the traditional ancien regime of Europe. Western perception of China even in the 18th century admired the Chinese bureaucratic system as favourable over European governments for its seeming meritocracy; Voltaire claimed that the Chinese had "perfected moral science" and François Quesnay advocated an economic and political system modeled after that of the Chinese. The governments of China, Egypt, Peru and Russian Empress Catherine the Great were regarded as models of Enlightened Despotism, admired by such figures as Diderot, D'Alembert and Voltaire. Napoleonic France adopted this meritocracy system and soon saw a rapid and dramatic expansion of government, accompanied by the rise of the French civil service and its complex systems of bureaucracy. This phenomenon became known as "bureaumania". In the early 19th century, Napoleon attempted to reform the bureaucracies of France and other territories under his control by the imposition of the standardized Napoleonic Code. But paradoxically, that led to even further growth of the bureaucracy. French civil service examinations adopted in the late 19th century were also heavily based on general cultural studies. These features have been likened to the earlier Chinese model.
==== The industrialized/globalized world ==== By the mid-19th century, bureaucratic forms of administration were firmly in place across the industrialized world. Thinkers like John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) and Karl Marx (1818–1883) began to theorize about the economic functions and power-structures of bureaucracy in contemporary life. Max Weber was the first to endorse bureaucracy as a necessary feature of modernity, and by the late-19th century bureaucratic forms had begun their spread from government to other large-scale institutions. The tertiary sector of economies began to increase relative to the size of the primary and secondary sectors. The term "white-collar" as applicable to bureaucratic employees occurs from 1910. Within capitalist systems, informal bureaucratic structures began to appear in the form of corporate power hierarchies, as detailed in mid-20th century works like The Organization Man (1956) and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955). Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries, a powerful class of bureaucratic administrators, the nomenklatura, came to govern nearly all aspects of public life — especially when state planning and control expanded into the economic sphere. The 1980s brought a backlash against perceptions of "big government" and of its associated bureaucracy. Politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan gained power promising to eliminate government regulatory bureaucracies, which they saw as overbearing, and to return economic production to a more purely capitalistic mode, which they saw as more efficient. In the commercial world, managers like Jack Welch gained fortune and renown by eliminating bureaucratic structures inside corporations. Still, in the modern world, most organized institutions rely on bureaucratic systems to manage information, process records, and administer complex systems, although the decline of paperwork and the widespread use of electronic databases is transforming the way bureaucracies function.
== Theories ==