'Sometimes these organizations were defacto distributed systems with multi-month latencies (eg. The British Empire).' Sorry if this is tangential, but the way

'Sometimes these organizations were defacto distributed systems with multi-month latencies (eg. The British Empire).' Sorry if this is tangential, but the way the British empire managed it was by devolving almost all decision making and power to the people running the colonies. Like tax, law, culture, religion, language etc. Foreign policy was the only area where the crown called the shots. The result was a very loosely coupled, very flexible, and adaptable distributed system, where one part would look and act competently differently to another part (I.e. Canada vs India).