Astral Codex Ten

British

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British

Article

British is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between October 14, 2021 and August 08, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “the British directly annexed, these are more likely to strengthen the case”; “Maybe in some sense the British won a “race” for radar”; “the British needed to inform the Americans about the existence of the plot”. It most often appears alongside America, Bill Gates, US.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: October 14, 2021
  • Last seen: August 08, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Links For October
October 14, 2021 · Original source
13: Latest salvo in the “was colonialism good/bad for economic development?” debate - areas of India that were under direct British colonial rule have 39% less nighttime illumination (a common proxy for developedness) than areas that maintained more local autonomy. Although there are probably confounders in terms of which areas the British directly annexed, these are more likely to strengthen the case than weaken it - the British annexed the most productive areas, and a subanalysis based on areas where annexation/non-annexation depended on quirks of royals dying shows stronger effects than the original finding. [EDIT: See this comment for skepticism]
Inline links: have 39% less nighttime illumination, this comment
Most Technologies Aren't Races
April 05, 2023 · Original source
The most consequential “races” have been for specific military technologies during wars; most famously, the US won the “race” for nuclear weapons. America’s enemies got nukes soon afterwards, but the brief moment of dominance was enough to win World War II. Maybe in some sense the British won a “race” for radar, although it wasn’t a “race” in the sense that the Axis knew about it and was competing to get it first. Maybe in some sense countries “race” to get better fighter jets, tanks, satellites, etc than their rivals. But ordinary mortals don’t concern themselves with such things. No part of US automobile policy is based on “winning the car race” against China, in some sense where consumer car R&D will affect tanks and our military risks being left behind.
Your Book Review: Nine Lives
September 13, 2024 · Original source
Evidence emerges that MI6 was funneling money to terrorists! Yeah, they did that. They needed a cover story for why Dean is traveling back and forth between Britain and Afghanistan, something that puts him in good standing in al-Qaeda and also prevents them from conscripting him to dangerous local battles against other Afghan warlords. So they invented a honey exporting business where Dean brought honey from Afghanistan to Britain (Afghan honey is allegedly really good, and honey exports were legitimately a major source of al-Qaeda’s funding), and MI6 gave him money that he could return to the camps. It was a few thousand dollars at a time, which was good money for the cash-strapped terrorists, but I trust MI6’s judgment that keeping a spy inside al-Qaeda’s inner circles was well worth this price.
Britain helps release a dangerous terrorist from prison! This one was actually in the news at the time, and the event was a result of another tragicomical communication failure between agencies, though this time no one was clearly at fault.
Like, who is he supposed to date and marry? If it’s a moderate or secular woman from Britain, his comrades will immediately realize he is no longer the fanatic jihadist he pretends to be. If he asks his relatives to find him a wife (as he sometimes considered doing so) from their Saudi circles, among women who would be proud to marry a jihadist… well, that’s going to end badly, isn’t it? Finding friends is not much easier for similar reasons. And the job itself — constantly pretending to be someone else, and fraternizing with extremists in the Middle East, Britain and on the Internet — is not anyone’s dream job. It’s not even very spy-novel-y most of the time: Dean would only get involved in an actually dangerous plot or learn an important secret once every year or two, otherwise it’s mostly boring monitoring. It’s no surprise that he considered quitting many times. But then the world would lose a vital information source on terrorist plots, and who knows what attack would go through that he could otherwise prevent, so he never quit, until an American journalist accidentally ended his career.
Your Review: My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes
August 08, 2025 · Original source
These roots resemble the ancestral stock of modern potatoes (source) Andean peoples found all sorts of ways to prepare their potatoes. The most immediate method was to boil them into stews, soups, or mashes with local flavoring agents - herbs, salt, chilis. Earthenware ovens called huatias were used to bake them. With even more time, they could be fermented into tocosh, an edible paste with antibacterial properties. To get the spuds to really last, though, they were subjected to a natural freeze-drying method that produced shrivelled potato pellets called chuño. Repeatedly frozen by bitter mountain nights, baked in the sun, and stomped on to remove water, chuño remains shelf stable for up to a decade and can be rehydrated into a spongy, earthy, slightly less nutritious potato-like object. The ability to produce chuño on the Altiplano is thought to have contributed to the Incan empire’s military dominance of the region, since despite its generally unappealing gustatory properties it’s perfect for keeping troops fed on long marches. Chuño also allowed Incan civilization to stockpile surpluses against lean years and trade potatoes as commodities over great distances. It wasn’t the best way to eat a potato you harvested today, but it was the only way to turn a potato you have today into a potato you’ll have two years from now. That had immense value. After the Spanish conquest and the Columbian exchange, the potato made gradual inroads into the Old World, where the previous best root vegetables were often comparatively less nutritious parsnips and turnips. There was an initial adjustment period: new cultivars capable of growing in shorter hours of daylight had to be developed, objections to the absence of tubers in the Bible needed to be quelled, and the French eventually had to concede that potatoes do not, as they at first believed, cause leprosy. With these hurdles cleared, in the 19th century the potato spread out and became one of the easiest and most efficient ways to turn arable land into palatable calories the world over. National cuisines incorporated the new staple crop thoroughly, and it’s now hard to imagine Italian food without gnocchi, French sans vichyssoise, tapas without patatas bravas, a Eurasia bereft of aloo and rösti and colcannon and latkes. Europe’s new potato lovers also took to the simple recipe of boiling ‘em and mashing ‘em. While South America had lacked the livestock for dairy, in Europe the potato mash soon achieved its ultimate form with the addition of milk and butter, which impart a smoother texture and richer taste. Hannah Glasse’s procedure published in 1747 in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is, minus the long s’s, still just about how I make them today: Maſhed Potatoes. BOIL your potatoes, peel them and put them into a ſauce-pan, maſh them well ; To two pounds of potatoes, put a pint of milk, a little ſalt, ſtir them well together, take care they don’t ſtick to the bottom, then take a quarter of a pound of butter, ſtir in and ſerve it up. Nowhere was the potato embraced more thoroughly than in Ireland. In the early 19th century, extractive British demands on Irish agriculture to feed the armies fighting Napoleon reduced the available land for Irish farmers to feed themselves. Achieving maximum caloric density on the remaining land was paramount, and almost nothing is denser than the potato. Potatoes quickly became an integral part of Irish life, so essential to the food systems of the island that when a blight hit them in the mid-1840s it led to one of the most devastating famines in history. The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale that the population of the island still has not recovered to its 1845 level almost two centuries later. Among those millions of potato-starved emigres were my dad’s ancestors, who came to America in the decades following the famine. My great-grandfather, who bore the extremely Irish name Gerald FitzGerald, instilled in his children (including my grandmother) a reconstructed sense of Irish-American ethnic pride that included an affinity for corned beef and cabbage, Guinness beer, and the affordable practicality of mashed potatoes. As the generations marched on, those mashed potatoes turned out to be one of the only things my grandmother would make that my exceedingly picky father would eat. Their creamy texture and subtle starchy taste didn’t trigger the “ew gross” reaction he had to so many other foods. Mashed potatoes, just like the ones Glasse had written about more than two centuries earlier, became his favorite side - and eventually, when I finally got to try them, one of mine too. Whatever My Dad Had Been Eating at Home Was NOT Mashed Potatoes The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”. These shreds resemble the ancestral stock of modern Instant Mashed Potatoes (source) The result was an affront. The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process, which when mixed with imprecise water ratios made for a slop that was somehow both gluey and soupy. Immediately after the war, French’s (now best known for mustard) tried to introduce “instant mashed potatoes” as a consumer product category. America’s veterans were not having it. They didn’t want to be reminded of the awful slurry they’d had on the front. The commercial fortunes of instant mashed potatoes began to turn around a decade later, however, when food scientists in the US and Canada converged on methods for producing dehydrated potato flakes rather than granules. The flakes had substantial advantages. They didn’t get as glutinous when reconstituted. Their geometry made them easier to dry quickly, on the order of minutes or even seconds. Using a multi-step process called the “Philadelphia Cook”, they could lock in a more natural flavor. When prepared on the stove with butter and milk, they were supposed to turn out almost as good as the real thing without any onerous prep work on the part of the consumer. This raises the question, though, of why food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances? This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance. Why did America start eating like it was on a total war footing again when my parents’ generation was young? There are a lot of overlapping explanations. Here are a few: Industrial inertia: Companies that had spun up to supply a vast army didn’t want to shut down overnight, so they necessarily pivoted to the consumer market. Some of these efforts succeeded at entrenching new consumer categories (fish sticks, canned peaches) while others (hamburgers-in-a-can) did not.
Inline links: source, chuño, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!sdbs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F785f66d4-986b-476e-9008-311ff035bcc1_1600x1307.png, source