Editing Meritocracy (section)

===17th century===
The concept of meritocracy spread from China to British India during the seventeenth century.<ref name="APH"/>

The first European power to implement a successful meritocratic civil service was the [[British Empire]], in their administration of India: "company managers hired and promoted employees based on competitive examinations in order to prevent corruption and favoritism".<ref name="APH"/> British colonial administrators advocated the spread of the system to the rest of the [[Commonwealth of Nations|Commonwealth]], the most "persistent" of which was Thomas Taylor Meadows, Britain's consul in [[Guangzhou]], [[China]]. Meadows successfully argued in his ''[[Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China]]'', published in 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.<ref>{{cite web|last=Bodde|first=Derke|title=China: A Teaching Workbook|url=http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/song/readings/inventions_ideas.htm|publisher=Columbia University|access-date=5 August 2012|archive-date=4 January 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120104040501/http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/song/readings/inventions_ideas.htm|url-status=live}}</ref> This practice later was adopted in the late nineteenth century by the British mainland, inspired by the "Chinese mandarin system".<ref name="MB">Huddleston, Mark W. Boyer, William W. ''The higher civil service in the United States: quest for reform''. (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 9-10.</ref>