"That was easy. How long a list is this?"

"There are currently fewer candidates than continents but I imagine lots of people will want to demonstrate their qualifications when I show some ability-to-pull-this-off."

"How're you planning to do that?"

"Become Minister of Magic, be more aggressive on the integration of magic and technology, we can make industry hundreds of times more powerful, make Britain by far the richest nation in the world, buy out the old blood of the rest of the wizarding world - all these families with a name but no gold to keep up their land..."

"What's the land get you?"

"The people get me permission to do the same industry-boost-fabulous-national-wealth thing in their countries, and then I absorb their magical government and inform their Muggle one more comprehensively."

"Oh, you're buying their influence, the land is incidental, okay."

"Yes, exactly."

"Why do you think nobody has taken over the world before, Minor and Karen and I were talking about that the other day and he thought it was because nobody had invented trains but I don't think that's it."

"Communication and travel times are probably why no Muggle's done it. Wizards, I'm not sure. Part of it is that we're a very traditional people and hesitate to change that, part of it's probably that everyone's who's tried either is or gets characterized as evil so good people mostly don't try..."

"That doesn't explain why nobody evil has pulled it off."

"I think it's substantially harder if you're evil! You'd think that wouldn't have to be true, because an evil person can at least act exactly like a good one if that were actually their best option, but in practice evil people do not seem capable of doing that and if you're evil and try taking over the world then there are lots of people willing to die stopping you."

"And I guess there are few enough wizards that maybe there just haven't been any really smart evil ones. Whose interests were 'taking over the world'."

"The absence of an evil wizard ruling the world is at least suggestive on that front. And, honestly, except for the ego boost I don't think ruling the world'd be much more personally entertaining than ruling a country - the administrative work scales with the size of an empire but you're already pretty much at the upper end of 'ways to be self-indulgent'..."

"If your idea of personal entertainment is self-indulgence, sure..."

"What would you find personally entertaining about ruling the world that ruling a country wouldn't suffice for?"

"I like it a lot more when problems are completely solved than when they are somewhat improved, in general. I maybe wouldn't use the words 'personally entertaining' but I don't need to run so much as a corner store to be personally entertained, there are books."

"Sure, but people who want to run the world so they can solve problems completely probably aren't the evil ones."

"I'm sure there are some people whose idea of a problem is, say, 'Muggles exist'."

"I actually cannot think of a way to solve that even if you had a pretty firm grip as emperor of the world. There's too many of them and you'd badly destabilize your whole society even trying."

"Yeah, but there's no particular indication it's even been seriously tried."

"True. I would point out to all the people who express the desire that the evidence isn't consistent with their sincerely holding it but probably I should not do that."

"Probably not."

"Buying out the American slave trade might work but in the Caribbean I think 'terror of a slave revolt' is as much of an incentive holding the system in place as the financial ones. Especially given what's going on in Haiti."

"I haven't made a particular point of reading the relevant news - but I feel like I wouldn't hear as often about Muggle Quakers condemning slavery left and right if everyone else thought it was obvious infeasible nonsense, they wouldn't get any traction."