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.

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.

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.