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How transportation technologies shaped empires

• belter 4y ago
  Let me introduce the Treaty of Tordesillas... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas
• 082349872349872 4y ago
  My understanding is that the British Raj was several months away from London?
  • karatinversion 4y ago
    Let alone that the Portuguese were in Brazil, and the Spanish in the _Philippines_, for some 300 years
    • jameshart 4y ago
      The Philippines is a great example of how to break this rule; it was almost more a colony of New Spain than of Spain. Basically converting the empire into a franchise operation? Or maybe a pyramid scheme? To enable it to scale out beyond that range? The VOC played a similar role in extending the Dutch empire’s reach.
      • notch656c 4y ago
        The Philippines has never been easy to grasp though. Even now the government maintains poor control of many of their thousands of islands. Colonization efforts there can be profitable but are also weak. To the extent the Philippines has been colonized they must generally satisfy themselves to control of major ports and trade routes and naval bases.
    • jollyllama 4y ago
      There's so many exceptions. Does the article address any of these?
    • PeterCorless 4y ago
      Exactly. See my post elsewhere in this discussion where I give the transit times for goods from Madrid China via the Manila Galleons and the Mexican caravan routes back to Madrid.
  • shagmin 4y ago
    One could argue the British augmented that by creating better local institutions in the far away places.
  • readthenotes1 4y ago
    were they ruling it or plundering it for most of that time, and after they started ruling, how long did it last?
  • Beltalowda 4y ago
    From what I can find: In 1858 – when the British Raj was established – it took about half a year since you had to go around cape the good hope. After the Suez canal opened in 1869 it took only ~2 months. In the following two decades expansion of the train network and faster steamboats further reduced it to about 2 weeks. So it really depends a bit on which period you're talking about as there were lots of things going on during the period, but for a substantial part of the British Raj's existence you could get there in a month or less. I expect the "law" is not as simple as "1 month travel time", but rather a calculation that factors in both travel time + communication time. For much of history these two value were mostly identical, but this changed with the adoption of the telegraph (and later, radio).
    • masklinn 4y ago
      > I expect the "law" is not as simple as "1 month travel time" Aka the article is complete bullshit.
      • Beltalowda 4y ago
        No, I didn't say that. It holds up for most of history, except for a fairly small window of ~50 years where communication was faster than travel (after that travel was fast enough that almost anywhere was less than 1 month away).
        • ComputerGuru 4y ago
          I agree. Imagine a future where we find a way to send messages at/near the speed of light intergalactically but can still only travel at some fraction of it.
          • danenania 4y ago
            We can already send messages at the speed of light. The problem is that's still way too slow for intergalactic communication (the nearest galaxy is 2.5 million light years away).
    • 4y ago
  • ekam 4y ago
    British Raj is a great argument for the article, started in 1858 and lasted less than a century, a blip in the historical context, as power projection was a recurring problem.
  • twelve40 4y ago
    I didn't write the article so I don't care either way, but I think the British Empire was a thing totally on its own. Probably (probably, I'm not a historian) because its technology (both physical and organizational) was so much more superior to the lands they invaded that the normal "laws of empire physics" didn't apply. In Australia (and NZ, and Canada, and the US, and probably in South Africa to a certain degree) their mode of operation seemed: reduce the locals to nothing (even worse than Spain), then build a fully Western-like society. Clean slate, mostly self-governed by white people who are not inclined to fight with Europe (with notable exceptions, obviously) In India - although I don't doubt for a second they killed many many people - they seemed to operate more like the Golden Horde in Russia: as long as you pay the taxes (and occasionally provide more stuff when we run out), you can keep your culture and be governed by your local warlords, because it's just too tedious to kill all of you at once. The British did seem to have a bit more sway though, for example when they kicked off the partitioning, millions of people started moving. However, largely it seems like a brutal but mostly hands-off rule (based on mutual benefit with the local elite?) What they did in Africa was something else, I've read books about insanely remote places like South Sudan or Zambia, and what were they doing there is hard for me to understand at all. But again, the gap in technology between the local people and them was so vast that they could do whatever they wanted without much coordination with the capital. The Romans and other empires of the past were different because they didn't have such a huge technology gap. In case of Romans, you still fight it out with spears, swords and bare hands, and they tended to take over the lands completely, and impose their own gods, order and culture, which is much harder to do with a similar level of technology and does require coordination with the capital.
• cs702 4y ago
  The logic seems sound to me, with a few obvious caveats: * The number of samples is small. There aren't a lot of empires throughout history. * The definition of "empire" is somewhat subjective, because empire sizes exhibit a Zipf distribution, and the cutoff is arbitrary. * Surely there have been other factors at play besides time to travel from the capital. One implication is that empires that span the globe are much more feasible today, thanks to modern travel, communications, and surveillance technologies.
  • tgv 4y ago
    But for future interplanetary colonization, the rule would become one light month. Not very far. But imagine any form of communication taking years to bounce back and forth. That could not be centrally governed. It might not just be travel time, but it probably does correlate.
    • shaoonb 4y ago
      Have you read much Le Guin by any chance? This is a theme I've seen in her work.
      • nindalf 4y ago
        Could you mention some books?
        • lantry 4y ago
          It's a big part of "the word for world is forest". A colony on one planet has essentially become self governing, until one day a ship delivers an instantaneous communication device, at which point the planet is back under imperial control. There's more to the story than that ofc There's also "The Dispossessed", where an anarchist movement travels to a distant planet in order to set up their own government.
          • ldh0011 4y ago
            > anarchist movement > set up their own government I'm pretty sure I get what you mean but I found that funny.
• irrational 4y ago
  What about the sun never setting on the British Empire? Wouldn't that mean the British empire was larger than 1 month of travel from the capital?
  • GalenErso 4y ago
    "The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line." Delegation of authority seems to partially help solve the problem.
  • jameshart 4y ago
    Why, I’d wager that, with modern Victorian transportation, a man could travel all the way around the world in less than eighty days. Meet me on the steps of the Reform club! Phileas Fogg’s example Suggests that at the height of the ‘sun never sets’ era, nowhere should have been more than 40 days away from London. And with a significant chunk of that time stuck transiting the pacific, brings the majority of the world into the 30 day window for a single month.
    • JustLurking2022 4y ago
      No, it suggests that there was an optimal path around the world in 80 days. The geography of many regions would have made them more remote than the optimal path.
      • jameshart 4y ago
        In seriousness, the article’s final thesis is literally that steamships and trains and telegraphs broke the ‘month’ rule by bringing essentially the whole world inside the one month range, which is what enabled a ‘sun never sets’ empire and then broke empires in general. Around the World in 80 days is set almost exactly at that inflection point.
      • PeterisP 4y ago
        The geography of those many remote regions (e.g. the interior of Africa or Australia or parts of Asia) meant that they were not really governed by the empires - it's just that they were linked to the wider world through various port cities, and those were generally governed by some empire and within a month of its capital, so the value of their trade was captured tehre.
• hprotagonist 4y ago
  This neatly explains Afghanistan, i think. Fundamentally unnavigable for the entirety of written history!
  • ARandomerDude 4y ago
    The interior of Africa, too.
    • inawarminister 4y ago
      That is also correlated with the multiple of tropical diseases wiping out traders and settlers until the 1800s or so. Tsetse flies in East Africa killing cattles and horses... Allowing local hunter-gatherers to survive herders and farmers expansions until recently enough. And empires don't really spawn in non-food-producing cultures.
  • int_19h 4y ago
    East Turkestan is arguably even more remote, yet China manages.
  • FlyingSnake 4y ago
    Afghanistan was part of large empires like Kushans, Graeco-Bactrians, Achaemeniens, Mauryas, Mughals, etc for long periods. It was also a part of the Silk Route to India through Khyber pass and was the epicenter of Graeco-Buddhist art centers like Bamyan and Mes Aynak. It was not un-navigable.
    • hprotagonist 4y ago
      Babur was probably the last man to hold the mountains with any seriousness, and he only held on for about a generation. My general feeling is that "We control Afghanistan" said more honestly is something closer to "I am the mayor of Kabul!"
• drbeast 4y ago
  Ghengis Khan, Queen Victoria, and Alexander the Great have entered the chat.
  • quartesixte 4y ago
    Eventually collapsed. Collapsed eventually. Collapsed immediately upon his death.
    • zopa 4y ago
      All empires collapse eventually.
      • pessimizer 4y ago
        Past performance isn't a guarantee of future results. With modern technology, the next empire will never collapse.
        • gsich 4y ago
          Until it does.
        • csomar 4y ago
          The heat death will guarantee the collapse of all and any empire.
      • meatyloafy 4y ago
        All except the last.
    • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      OK, but England maintained Australia for centuries. Spain maintained the New World for centuries. I'm not sure "eventually collapsed" is proof that "it didn't work". I mean, the Soviet Union eventually collapsed, and that wasn't because of communication delays. Everything eventually collapses. But "stood for centuries, despite the communication delays" kind of disproves the hypothesis. (Or if it doesn't, given the things that collapse after centuries without the communication delays, it means the hypothesis has no predictive power.)
• perihelions 4y ago
  The article mentions but doesn't discuss Mesoamerican empires. I think those should have some interesting idiosyncracies. There was a total absence of horses/oxes/draft animals before the Columbian exchange, so transportation and notions of geographic distance might have been very different.
• onion2k 4y ago
  This will significantly limit humanity's ambitions to colonize outer space.
  • stakhanov 4y ago
    Or increase them? Presumably some portion of humanity might be motivated by trying to get away from existing empires (maybe creating new ones, maybe not), rather than expanding existing empires.
  • kranke155 4y ago
    Depends on the velocity. 1 light month is pretty big.
    • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      Within one light month of earth, there is only one solar system - the one containing Earth, obviously.
      • kranke155 4y ago
        Really ? Crap I thought we’d have a couple of star systems in there…
    • onion2k 4y ago
      1 light month is pretty big. So is the universe. In fact, 1 light month gets you across 0.00000000061% of it. If your empire on Earth was the same size it'd be 300 square meters. About the size of a big house with a nice garden.
  • jerf 4y ago
    Fortunately, while this study may exist, imperial ambitions know no bounds, so we'll colonize just fine. Sure, decades later, they may break away, but that's decades later's problem. Plus, this analysis is implicitly in the context of a world where the regions have the ability to be self-sustaining on at least the basics of life, so breaking away is a viable option. If the "empire" is also "your supply of oxygen", breaking away will be a lot trickier. For a space colony or set of colonies to be able to break away, they first have to be truly 100% self-sufficient, and that's a tall bar for the forseeable future. They then have to be able to militarily match what the empire is willing to throw at them to retain them, and that's a very complicated analysis, made all the more complicated by not knowing what the exact technologies will be at the time. (Plus, not all empires are complete buffoons. They at least begin being competently run. The empire will know that to break away the colonies must be self-sufficient, so they will take steps to ensure they won't be self-sufficient. And the colonies will take steps to become secretly self-sufficient. Long before open rebellions occur, there will have been a clandestine war of self-sufficiency.)
• jameshart 4y ago
  “England with its American colonies” as an example of overstretching this limit? Once again, when explaining a historic trend or event in terms of what happened in the US, we forget about the existence of the control case: Canada.
  • b112 4y ago
    And even more so, re: distance, Australia.
    • macspoofing 4y ago
      The article contends that the reason why the 'month rule' is in play is because of the logistics of ruling over a local population which will attempt to rebel. So I think a mitigating factor for US, Canada, Australia was that the local native population was wiped out by old-world diseases, so there was minimal capability for local population to rebel. This is also the major factor of why those nations' population is largely made-up of the descendent of the colonists. Contrast that with Africa, which suffered from similar attempts at colonialism, was much closer to Europe, but because its native population was not susceptible to European diseases (and in fact, the colonists were decimated by native diseases like malaria), Africa today has a tiny number of colonial descendants (around 5 million European descendants out of a population of ~1 billion) The population of pre-colonized North America was on the order of 60 million (European population was on the order of ~70 million). Had that population been maintained (i.e. not wiped out by old-world diseases), there was zero chance of European powers being able to establish large colonial populations. In that scenario, once the technological advantage was removed (due to trade, for example), I think you would have seen successful native rebellions. I would say South America also follows this pattern. No chance of the Spanish being able to establish large colonial populations or maintain hold over native South American populations had they been not wiped out by old-world diseases.
  • tgv 4y ago
    Or Spain and South America?
    • 4y ago
• ErikCorry 4y ago
  Interesting, but almost all the examples are from before the invention of the telegraph.
• blululu 4y ago
  This is taken from Caesar Marchetti’s work on the invariance of certain parameter, related is his work on city size: http://www.cesaremarchetti.org/archive/electronic/basic_instincts.pdf http://www.cesaremarchetti.org/archive/electronic/basic_inst...
  • diordiderot 4y ago
    Very entertaining read
  • agumonkey 4y ago
    on my machine this pdf is barely readable, here's a copy https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/4071/1/RR-95-04.pdf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/4071/1/RR-95-04.pdf (hope it's not a problem for the author) ps: as a sidenote, I remember someone saying that the invention of fridges is a factor in the evolution of cities/transporation too. Never found solid work on this but it makes sense, you keep things closer if you can't conserve food.
• deleted 4y ago
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• BurningFrog 4y ago
  By this logic, the Mars colonies will be independent.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • idontpost 4y ago
    [dead]
  • swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
    With better propulsion, trips to mars could be shorter. There are times where Mars is on the opposite side of the sun, and times when Earth and Mars are close.
  • int_19h 4y ago
    Only if they are self-sufficient with respect to the basics. It's hard to rebel when the other side can just cut off your food supply until you starve into compliance.
• micro_charm 4y ago
  See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant IMO there is a clear analogue for this with organizational size and the extent of your product offering, the further off from your core offering you extend the worse your entire offering becomes
• kybernetyk 4y ago
  So no Mars province?
  • layer8 4y ago
    Another relevant factor is self-sufficiency regarding basic needs. But yes, if/when a Mars colony becomes self-sufficient, secession probably isn’t far off.
    • RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
      Put another way, a mars colony that is not mostly self-sufficient is a death trap, because the lead time on any supply shipments or rescue attempts is monumental even if funding is unlimited. There will be ever-present pressure to increase self-sufficiency. If complete self-sufficiency is technologically achieved (and there aren't inherent, unavoidable issues with propagating humans on mars or obtaining resources/energy), earth-based corporations and governments have virtually zero leverage over mars, so independence follows naturally.
  • kcb 4y ago
    You can travel to Mars in 5 minutes so I don’t think so. It’s clear even in todays world you don’t need “boots on the ground” to exert social or military influence.
• xrd 4y ago
  Interesting how geography limited empires before the advent of instant communication. It would be fascinating to see a comparison of the impact on empires when instant communication is possible. What kind of regime change is possible when you can instantly spread propaganda and no longer need Paul Revere riding around telling everyone the British are coming.
  • rcarr 4y ago
    Communication obviously plays a big part but I think time to action is probably the better metric. You need to be able to act quicker than your opponent, and if you can't, you need to be able to absorb the damage they can inflict in the mean time whilst still having enough resources to inflict more damage than you sustained when you can eventually act.
  • krisoft 4y ago
    > before the advent of instant communication. But! Instant communication is not possible. :) This sounds like a nitpicking but this might become important if we spread out in space: We still have the light speed limit on communication. Which of course means that our communication is practically instantaneous around all of earth. (at least when measured against human reaction times.) But if we would spread ourselves to let's say the Oort cloud you would see very serious lag in communication. Not just between Earth and the cloud, but between points on the Oort cloud. Could the whole cloud ever be controlled by a single empire? Or would it break into a Voronoi diagram of "1 light month" large cells around points of interest?
    • swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
      Is there enough matter for a serious political faction to subsist off of? The total mass of the asteroid belt is calculated to be 3% that of the Moon [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt We only use a small fraction of matter on the Earth, so maybe a good sized comet can host habitation. But the solid planets and moons are where humanity could thrive. The gas giants have too a gravity well, we'd need some seriously advanced propulsion to make it off, but there's 317x more matter on Jupiter than Earth.
• AntiRemoteWork 4y ago
  [dead]
• nathias 4y ago
  it probably depends on the tickrate of the governance
• shae 4y ago
  This is why you need more mass transit where you live.
• aj7 4y ago
  Somebody calculate a light month.
  • shagie 4y ago
    30x distance to Voyager 1/50th the distance to the nearest star (Proxima Centauri).
  • awb 4y ago
    1 light year = ~0.3 parsecs 1 light month = ~0.025 parsecs
  • xwdv 4y ago
    It’s about 5000 AU. That means an Earth based space empire could encompass the entire solar system, but the limit of its reach would only extend part way into the Oort Cloud. Beyond this would be a lawless frontier. Since this is based on the speed of light, it could be the maximum size for any empire in the universe without the use of some kind of FTL technology.
    • krisoft 4y ago
      > Since this is based on the speed of light, it could be the maximum size for any empire in the universe without the use of some kind of FTL technology. That assumes that the "1 month from capital" is universal. Maybe humans are just quarrelsome, and if uplifted capybaras would rule an empire they could keep it together even if their empire has a 2 year radius. Who knows.
      • Someone 4y ago
        Also, aliens could live a lot slower (say if they evolved in a relatively cold corner of the universe where there’s less energy to burn per second) and/or longer. Looking at some ‘aliens’, I don’t think ant colonies can cover an area equal to a month’s travel. ⇒ I would guess “1 month” isn’t the limiting factor. “1/p of the life expectancy of a grownup” makes more sense to me. p then would be around 500 (500 months is about 42 years)
      • 4y ago
• lkrubner 4y ago
  Portugal conquered Goa in 1510 -- that's more than a month of travel. The Netherlands conquering Java in 1619? A lot more than a month. And these conquests lasted for centuries.
  • alephnerd 4y ago
    To be fair, Dutch control of Java was more on paper than it was in reality. Most governance was devolved to local Rajahs who paid tribute to the VOC. Actual guns on the ground control across Java and most of what became Indonesia didn't really happen until the late 19th century Also, Goa's existence was because it was so marginal. The Mughals, Marathas, and various regional kingdoms didn't care enough about the Portuguese, and also it was de facto treated as a factory (a free trade zone) - just like Surat was for the English
    • FlyingSnake 4y ago
      > The Mughals, Marathas, and various regional kingdoms didn't care enough about the Portuguese Sorry to be that guy, but Marathas cared deeply about Goa and they constantly waged wars against them and liberated most of the territory by 1739. Except tiny enclaves like Daman, Diu and Velha Goa most of the Provincia do Norte including the crown jewel of Baçaim (Vasai) was lost. Velha Goa, Anjidiva etc were saved by a stroke of luck due to the arrival of fresh Portuguese Armada with a new Viceroy. The current boundaries of Goa were only extended later when the Rajas agreed to merge with Portuguese during Maratha civil war period on 1790s, however the Hindu elites retained most of the autonomy like the Visconde of Pernem.
      • deleted 4y ago
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  • tarentel 4y ago
    I'm not sure capturing and holding an island would constitute an empire.
    • 4y ago
• amelius 4y ago
  Human travel? Or information travel?
  • sbaiddn 4y ago
    That's a fascinating question. I guess the answer is both. Fast info gives you extra time since you don't suffer the latency to send the shock troops.
    • kcb 4y ago
      I think it’s further than that. If the drones, satellites and if necessary the humans with guns that get their paycheck wired from earth are already prepositioned then the latency becomes minutes.
      • inawarminister 4y ago
        I believe this is sufficiently exhibited by 18th-19th century imperial powers that have telegraphs and able to have the centre dictate unit movements and campaigns to the peripheries. Compared to previous eras where the local potentate is the ultimate source of order - at least for short and medium terms (see also: Spanish Viceroy of Netherlands, 1540-1600s) Then again, you can see the difference between, say, the 1880s and 1920s, when airplanes became mature. Dictate by message compared to centre agents coming in to intervene directly...
• maw 4y ago
  Unrelated to the article's thesis: the use of both colors and numbers in the static map of the Roman Empire is very clever and I wish this technique were used more often. I don't in general have trouble distinguishing colored areas when they're adjacent to each other. But when they're separated from each other -- as is often the case with a map and its legend -- it becomes a lot more difficult. Using colors to show extent and numbers to match up with the legend is a great solution to this problem. Take note!
• adolph 4y ago
  There are some interesting ideas in there that should be more fully worked out. Perhaps they have and folks could suggest further reading? Travel is a suitcase word in that Pueyo doesn't distinguish among what is being moved: material, people, information. In the earliest days maybe there was less of a difference, except for the cases where there was a significant difference such as the Inca chasqui which operated as a relay race.
• soundmasterj 4y ago
  They're saying we can have the moon.
• charliea0 4y ago
  I think there’s an xkcd on modeling complex systems with a single parameter: https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/. More seriously, I think the predictive power of this hypothesis is low. Clearly travel time is important to maintaining a connected empire but it’s probably not the limiting factor.
• jkingsbery 4y ago
  If the hypothesis includes the stipulation "from the capital," it would have been useful to see some commentary on what the author thought about the Roman Empire moving its capital (or having multiple emperors each with a capital).
• Quarrelsome 4y ago
  Excellent article generally but I don't think the point about Napoleon was very strong and rather diminished the article as it conflates the concept of military supply with Imperial administration and I think the two subjects differ in practice. (i.e. in another reality where Napoleon had superior temporarily military supply in Russian held territories then he could have conquered Russia. If that happened; whether he could hold the territory for the years that follow would however be an argument for this article).
• imbnwa 4y ago
  >This also helps explain for example why feudalism was so prevalent in Europe during the Middle Ages. Without well-maintained Roman roads, the time needed to go from one place to another extended, which made it that much harder to control big empires. Small, local warlords emerged. They were the ones with enough money to afford a horse and armor This point is another reminder for me that Game of Thrones' Westeros, the Seven Kingdoms, should've collapsed the minute all the dragons were lost in the Dance of Dragons, particularly the North, where it takes months to get to Winterfell from King's Landing. This writer[0] also noted how impossible Westeros as a united entity should be along with other issues with GRRM's world design. Nevermind that the size of Westeros should have a significant impact on its anthropology. This is a needlessly nerdy analysis, and most are aware of GRRM's well-known disclaimer about his faults, but no one even comments on anyone having an accent in Westeros, except for that of the Dornish (which is kinda sketch IMO). * The relative isolation of the North and the Iron Islands would've seen them continue to speak and evolve the First Men's language, though with far more Andalic influence than the language spoken north of the Wall. * Dorne would speak a spectrum that goes from the Andalic of the Marches to the Andalic/Rhoynish patois most people would speak in Sunspear * The Sea Lords, much like the Channel Islands IRL, would've continued to speak a dialect of High Valyrian that would've had a strong Andalic influence and the Targaryens would've spoken this dialect. Its a bit strange that the Targaryens basically just stopped speaking Valyrian though where IRL it took the Normans, also a dominant political minority, almost 400 years to start speaking English conversationally. The royal court and the high lords would all have learned to speak it. * The Riverlands' dialect would be most related to the Stormlands' dialect since the Storm King ruled there for 300 years. * The Vale, also relatively isolated since its accessible over land through a scant few mountain passes, like Portugal and Spain IRL where Portuguese has more in common with vulgar Latin, would speak the 'purest' dialect of Andalic that has more in common with the Andalic that was spoken in Essos. [0]https://medium.com/migration-issues/westeros-is-poorly-designed-3b01cf5cdcaf https://medium.com/migration-issues/westeros-is-poorly-desig...
  • nostrademons 4y ago
    Also the stability of the Kingdoms of Westeros is ridiculous given their ages. Supposedly they were divided into the Kingdoms of the North/Vale/Iron Islands/Reach/Rock/Stormlands/Dorne in the Age of Heroes - 10,000 years before the Targaryen conquest. 10,000 years is twice as long as all of recorded human history. In that time on earth, dozens of empires have risen and fallen. The center of civilization moved from the Middle East to Egypt to Greece to Rome to Byzantium & Arabia to western Europe to Britain to North America. Independent civilizations with equal claims to greatness sprung up elsewhere on the globe. Civilizations got conquered, technology advanced, genocides and plagues and famines happened, languages changed, and dynasties typically lasted a couple hundred years, if that. Meanwhile, over in Westeros, the same 7 kingdoms have been ruled over the same geographic extent by the same 7 families at roughly the same level of technological development for 10,000 years. It took outsiders with dragons to conquer them. No explanation is given over how you could maintain what appear to be feudal structures over a 3000+ mile continent with bronze age technology.
• jfzoid 4y ago
  Chinese saying: "the mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away" （山高帝遠）
  • thriftwy 4y ago
    Russian saying: be further from higher ups, closer to the kitchen (подальше от начальства, поближе к кухне)
• somenameforme 4y ago
  It seems to me that distance would just be a correlation to the real variable. If a government could keep a people 5,000 miles, or even 50 million miles, away content enough to not undermine them, then obviously that government could continue to rule this group of people indefinitely. So it seems that the real variable here is contentedness, which distance correlates strongly against. The further someone is away from their government, the less likely they are to feel that it's "their" government or have any sort of shared "camaraderie" for lack of a better word. There are plenty of examples of empires having at least tentacles stretched well beyond 3000 miles sustainably, even at the beckoning of the colonies, as in the case of e.g. Anguilla with the Brits. Yet no empire can maintain stability, regardless of their size, in the face of rising discontent.
  • wintogreen74 4y ago
    Discontent seems (to me) implicit in foreign rule though, the degree just being a matter of with what and for how much the local population is being bought off. Are there any examples where an empire doesn't treat it's outer reaches as second-class citizens and survives?
    • complex_exp 4y ago
      Russia. All the asian russians are very much treated as second class citizens, from the top (deciding where to draft mobiks from) to the bottom (a much worse case of what americans today would call police brutality / bias). We have to see if it survives though.
      • int_19h 4y ago
        The problem is that Russia has succeeded in settling many of its colonized territories such that natives are minorities in most of their titular region. Consider Buryatia for a prominent example - Buryats have been used as Russian shock troops in Ukraine since 2015 (Debaltsevo), yet population of the republic is only 44% Buryat but 53% Russian. On top of that, much of the native population is culturally Russified. Tuva and ethnic republics of the Caucasus are where the natives have majorities that mostly retain their separate cultural and ethnic identity, so if something does fall apart, I would expect it to happen there.
• wintogreen74 4y ago
  A lot of counter-cases are conflating specific conquests with the the overall empire. There will be exceptions (in both directions of closer & further) but I think what the author is trying to do is set the radius of the empire, relative to a one or a few epicenters. I don't think the exact value is that important vs. the logistical impacts of distance and their influence on all aspects of controlling a geopolitical entity.
  • kgeist 4y ago
    If you take Russian Empire/USSR for example, most of the territories which have been lost are much closer to Moscow (Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Belarus, Georgia etc.) than the territories still under Moscow control (Siberia), so at least in the Russia's case, it's not about transportation at all.
    • ComputerGuru 4y ago
      Siberia is kind of its own exception, though. I’d say they managed to keep Siberia - for reasons solely to do with Siberia - despite how bad they were at keeping the empire together, relatively speaking.
      • thriftwy 4y ago
        It's just that Siberia is predominantly populated by ethnic Russians and USSR did not succeed in growing any regional identity there.
    • swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
      Canada de facto owns a huge amount of territory. Nobody else wants it. Vladivostok is desireable to many powers in the region, but it's also changed hands many times in recent history.
      • notch656c 4y ago
        What lands are de facto Canada but not de jure Canada's?
• dalbasal 4y ago
  I feel like there's some cherry picking going on. I mean, issues with germanic tribes and inland conquests did play a role but... what about upper egypt, paetrea, britannia, etc. The edge of the empire was the edge of the empire... with frontier problems. Why did germania fail, but not those other ones. I mean size is an issue. Travel & messaging are issues. Empires are very much defined by these things, etc. I just don't see where the clear watershed is. Early modern european empires colonized the americas, SE Asia, the african coast... Those were months of treacherous sailing. "Empire" in those cases meant something totally different than for Rome. Rome marched in with troops and took political control. Portugal & the Dutch, England and such established small colonies that grew in power until they were hegemons. Sometimes just a small port or town. Anyway... I think Rome's limiting factor in germania and the european frontier was barbarism. NW europeans didn't have civilization: states, monarchies, temples, senates, roads, nations. The germans didn't even know they were germans until Romans told them. Rome's empire was based on assuming political control over existing political institutions. It's economy was dependant on this approach. Rome's African and Asian territories had been civilized for Millenia. Jerusalem, Carthage, Luxor, etc. Europe had no cities. How do you tax? In northern europe, arabia and such Rome's empire looked like the early days of early modern colonialism. Slave export & frontier plantations supporting a Roman villa lifestyle for a small number of colonists. Most of the natives didn't pay tax, or participate in Roman life. Egypt, under rome, shipped grain to the capital and enriched Roman officials. In "the colonies," it worked in reverse. Rome had to ship them soldiers and money to keep the colony going.
  • vondur 4y ago
    Barbarism is certainly a factor in the Roman expansion into Germania, but if you look at how the Romans were able to colonize Gaul completely. I think originally they thought they could follow the same playbook into both Germania and Britain. Britain was never full pacified and required a large occupation force to keep the province under control. After the defeat of Varus during the reign of Augustus, I think Roman leadership looked at the area using a cost/benefit analysis and decided it wasn't worth the amount of money that would be needed to fully pacifiy the region. The Romans should have pulled out of Britain after Claudius, the invasion was a vanity project and had no real value as a province.
• uwagar 4y ago
  who wants to know this? and why?
• FredPret 4y ago
  So… the moon, or even Venus?
  • shagie 4y ago
    Not sure Venus is within 1 month travel time. Granted this is with Apollo era technology... but we're still talking Saturn V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_flyby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_Venus_flyby > The proposed mission would have used a Saturn V to send three astronauts on a flight past Venus, which would have lasted approximately one year. > ... > Phase C would be the actual manned flyby, using a Block IV CSM and an updated version of the Venus flyby S-IVB which would carry a large radio antenna for communication with Earth. > ... > The Phase C mission was planned for a launch in late October or early November 1973, when the velocity requirements to reach Venus and the duration of the resulting mission would be at their lowest. After a brief stay in Earth parking orbit to check out the spacecraft, the crew would have headed for Venus. ... After a successful S-IVB burn, the spacecraft would have passed approximately 3000 miles from the surface of Venus about four months later. Of note https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php is fun to play with. - Custom list (Venus), one way rendezvous, minimize duration, all trajectories. The shortest one is an 80 day one "burn straight there" approach. I'm not sure that NASA has that updated for more recent years (its a search - not a compute) - still gives you an idea of what is doable and the inner solar system opportunities are fairly consistent (compared to the Grand Tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program which is once every 175 years). See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo... and if that sounds like fun, then High Frontier board game might be up your alley ( current edition https://iongamedesign.com/products/high-frontier-4-all https://iongamedesign.com/products/high-frontier-4-all https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/281655/high-frontier-4-all https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/281655/high-frontier-4-a... ).
    • shagie 4y ago
      The Venus missions... One way rendezvous - 80 days is the minimal - https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NECs=on&chk_maxMag=on&maxMag=25&chk_maxOCC=on&maxOCC=4&chk_target_list=on&target_list=Venus&mission_class=oneway&mission_type=rendezvous&LD1=2016&LD2=2024&maxDT=2.0&DTunit=yrs&maxDV=7.0&min=DT&wdw_width=-1&submit=Search#a_load_results https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NE... If you're just doing a flyby and letting the ship then get lost, it can get down to 48 days https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NECs=on&chk_maxMag=on&maxMag=25&chk_maxOCC=on&maxOCC=4&chk_target_list=on&target_list=Venus&mission_class=oneway&mission_type=flyby&LD1=2016&LD2=2024&maxDT=2.0&DTunit=yrs&maxDV=7.0&min=DT&wdw_width=-1&submit=Search#a_load_results https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NE... The one way flyby is not likely one that would be good for human travelers as you aren't really stopping (or even slowing down enough to get captured). The shortest round trips are just over a year long. https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NECs=on&chk_maxMag=on&maxMag=25&chk_maxOCC=on&maxOCC=4&chk_target_list=on&target_list=Venus&mission_class=roundtrip&mission_type=rendezvous&LD1=2016&LD2=2024&maxDT=2.0&DTunit=yrs&maxDV=7.0&min=DT&wdw_width=-1&submit=Search#a_load_results https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NE... The trip there is only 90 days, but the return leg is one of the least optimal options with a 280 day "climb back out" trip. You could do a 96 day there, and 80 day back, but to get the right orbital arrangement it then means that you'd need to stay at Venus for 1.3 years. It is a neat thing to play with and see what options exist.
• scythe 4y ago
  I'm tempted to dispute whether the Carolignian Empire was too big per se. If you put the capital at Lyon (or Geneva), everything is fully reachable in a month on this graph. The problem, rather, was that Lyon was never made the capital (rather Metz in the far north), or at least not in time to prevent fragmentation.
• paxys 4y ago
  The rise and fall of empires is a way more complex topic than the author paints it to be in this post. Yes distance to the outer reaches is an important factor, but so are a hundred others. Economics, religion, trade, climate, technological progress, and above all leadership – all play an important role in the shaping of civilization.
• hammock 4y ago
  The article's conclusion is validated by the deployment times of US aircraft carrier groups around the world... To deploy from the Pacific to the Persian Gulf is approximately one month. Historical data backing that up: https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-7633a527c8e2a2228fcdd8ebce52f510-lq https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-7633a527c8e2a2228fcdd...
• jonplackett 4y ago
  There goes intergalactic empires then…
• manv1 4y ago
  That's not true, as evidenced by many, many empires, past and present (Spanish, British, Roman, American) that spanned more than a month of travel. What they're trying to say is that the span of control is limited by the ability to project power/information to the extremities of the empire. That makes sense, but the way they measure the limits is wrong. The way the empires get around this problem is by putting people who have drunk the kool-aid in positions of power. While this can lead to abuse (ie: the Spanish), it can also lead to surprising amounts of consistency (all of the above). Empires that fail are empires that require centralized decision making...and that's due to the communication limits posited and the generally poor quality of the staff in those types of organizations.
  • derefr 4y ago
    > The way the empires get around this problem is by putting people who have drunk the kool-aid in positions of power. I always understood the aphorism as taking delegation of power into account — it's "one month of travel" not because of the needs of top-down command-and-control, but rather because delegated power that's more than a month away falls past some threshold of latency required to "keep them in hand." The aphorism might make more sense flipped in perspective and inverted: as a magistrate/governor, if you see your colonists suffering under the tyranny of a remote power, you'd better be at least a month away from that power to be able to quietly rebel under the nose of that remote power. Otherwise a quiet rebellion will never work — any closer, and they'll be constantly watching/auditing you. At a closer distance, if you want to rebel, the only option is an active, bloody rebellion — and if that's unpalatable to you, then you'd better just not rebel!
    • bobthepanda 4y ago
      There’s an old Chinese proverb for this that’s pretty succinct: “The mountains are tall and the emperor is far away.”
  • notch656c 4y ago
    >centralized decision making Which bodes poorly for increasing federal power in the US.
• _8j50 4y ago
  This was true before the 20th century but my opinion is that instant communication, payment and relatively fast weapons delivery meant for over a century now this rule is no longer valid. Your empire can be as big as you want it to, even expand to the moon but probably not beyond. The limiting factor now is the appetite for war and conquest by a population that can communicate and organize efficiently to overthrow or change rulers as well as interference from global nuclear powers.
• haunter 4y ago
  Case in point: Crusader Kings 2/3. Both games are insane and if you say start with the Holy Roman Empire you can see how things can fall apart quickly when you want to extend beyond the already enourmous territory.
• miovoid 4y ago
  Does this rule works for information signal speed in general? Does empire in space cannot be large than 1 month light in radius?
  • drexlspivey 4y ago
    You can get around that by turning the empire into a federation which is the case in most sci-fi novels
  • Hithredin 4y ago
    I guess the distance is also proportional to the strenght of the remote part and the brutality of a vengeance from the capital. England, Fance, Spain, Portugal keeping colonies for a while until they technologically matched and that enlightened europe would be less tolerant of a bloody revenge. Russia, China still controlling their colonies because there is no local comparable strenght in those moutain/toundra/desert parts.
• golemotron 4y ago
  Our last planet, Neptune, fits neatly within one light-month. The rest of the heliosphere does too, but not the Oort cloud. Looks like empires are purely solar system affairs. Sci-fi authors take note.
  • cactacea 4y ago
    Article is a little light on details with regards to why the author believes this effect exists. I have to imagine that their thinking is that application of force is limited to the distance you can travel one month instead of anything that would relate to the application of soft power (e.g. communication). Supplying a ground based force follows more of a square-cube law. You need to feed your horses to transport your food to feed your soldiers. Going further means more food for the horses to carry the food for the horses to carry the food for the soldiers. There is an excellent post here that explains this far better than I ever could: https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-wagon-equation https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-wago... Any limitations on space based empires, while similar, are going to follow somewhat different rules depending on the tech involved. Unlike horses, once you launch you don't really have an opportunity to resupply a space based force going a long distance without inordinate energy expenditure. I'm not convinced force projection over a galaxy would be a problem for a civilization capable of travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Solving one problem (travel) necessarily solves the other (distribution of force). I think the bigger question is more, why bother? What possible reason could a civilization have to go to war at that scale? Human civilization would need to change so much to get to that point that I'm not certain these are questions are explorable at our place in the timeline. We'd be like Romans dreaming about a better abacus.
  • int_19h 4y ago
    This has been a recurring theme in sci-fi going back decades. Le Guin's Hainish Cycle is mostly this kind of universe, for example, even though it has FTL comms (but not travel). Of course, none of this matters if you do have FTL travel, which the "space empires" kind usually does.
• mymythisisthis 4y ago
  I don't see this as a case of 'information speed'. It's more like, who wants to wait more than 30 days for a package to get delivered. Each yearly task takes specific tools and ingredients, that you can't wait for. There is a certain yearly rhythm, so people are on 30 day schedules. 1 month of harvest in the fall (October) 1 month of processing the food (November) 1 month of swapping and trading food (December) 1 month of keeping animals alive in winter (January) 1 month of animal husbandry (February) 1 month of winter planting (March) 1 month of birthing new animals (April) 1 month of spring plating (May) 1 month of early harvests (June) 1 month of tending to planted crops (July) 1 month of travel (August) 1 month of making clothing and other things (September)
• asah 4y ago
  Travel? or communication? (in the ancient world, they were the same but in the modern world they're obviously different for example if we colonize Mars)
• arthurofbabylon 4y ago
  I'm wondering how to apply this in my life. People -> Should the contracted teams I work with have more frequent or deeper touch points? Can I make it even easier for customers and strangers to contact me? Do I generally signal that I'm open and willing to listen to the people in my life? Places -> Is there a convenient way to get around town that I'm neglecting? Ideas -> How can I create rapid channels of info from more distant communities or corners of the internet? What newsletters should I subscribe to? The idea here is that we need to manage our space – geographic, social, conceptual – and that it may serve us to expand our zone of access.
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• 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  Travel time is more important in wartime. It's quite hard to conquer a place if your supply lines are too long. But if you do conquer, you can hold it for a long time with much less effort. I found this part of the article to be nonsense: Alexander the Great conquered most of the “known world” of his day. But his conquests took them 10 years, and after his death, the empire was split in six. Which further proves that a strong army, without proper transportation technologies, can’t hold an empire together. Uhhh..... first of all dude, only taking 10 years to conquer the entire known world (when the conqueror is 20 years old) is pretty fucking insane, let's give the kid some credit. But yeah, his empire was split in six when he died. Why? He had no heir, he was the king of the entire known world, and he died suddenly. Conflict was bound to happen. This in no way provides any evidence to this point that transportation is critical to keeping an empire.
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• ozim 4y ago
  It is something I read before in a book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_and_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_and_Communications
• logifail 4y ago
  This is another click-baity title submission which doesn't remotely match the title of the source ("How Transportation Technologies Shaped Empires") :(
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• TomK32 4y ago
  Never knew those cataracts were are thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataracts_of_the_Nile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataracts_of_the_Nile
  • marc_abonce 4y ago
    TIL that cataracts aren't necessarily waterfalls.
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• dudeinjapan 4y ago
  Civilization the game needs to re-add travel along rivers. If I remember correctly you could do it in Civ II because rivers were tiles.
• PeterCorless 4y ago
  Counterargument: Manila galleons plied the seas for 250 years. • First trade ships would stop in Ming China then take their cargoes to Manila. It took months to get there and back to Manila. • The leg from Manila to Monterey, California, took about three months. • The next leg, from Monterey to Acapulco, was another month. In total, it could be five or six months travel. • Cargo was unloaded in Acapulco to be sent overland via on the Camino de los Virreyes, first to Mexico City then to Veracruz. This overland trip could take over a month depending on the progress of the baggage train. These were called the Galleon Caravans. • In Veracruz, the trade goods were loaded onto the annual heavily guarded treasure (plate or plata) fleets back to Spain. They did this rather than trying to risk passage through the Straights of Magellan or shipping back around the Cape of Good Hope (the southern tip of Africa). • The ships left Veracruz (alternatively spelled Vera Cruz) to meet up with the South American treasure fleet in Havana, Cuba. These trips often took a long northerly trip, nearly to the coast of Louisiana. These trips were highly variable and could take as short as two weeks or as long as three months. Three weeks seems to be about average. • The transit time from Havana back to the Casa de Contratación in Seville Spain was nearly two months. • Of course, Seville was just the port of entry. Goods then needed to be transported on to Madrid. The raw silver used to fund these expensive trips was eventually taken by the bankers backing Spain directly to the Italian port city of Genoa. So in total, one way, it was about a year for cargo to go from Ming China to Madrid. This system of imperial trade continued for, again, TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES. Long before the advent of the steam engine or the telegraph. • (Every segment mentioned above also has a return trip component. For the Manilla Galleons that got to Acapulco it was at least three months to travel back from Mexico to the Philippines. That was the "easy" passage.) Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_galleon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_galleon https://www.guampedia.com/stops-along-the-manila-galleon-trade-route/ https://www.guampedia.com/stops-along-the-manila-galleon-tra... https://brewminate.com/spanish-treasure-fleets-from-the-16th-to-18th-centuries/ https://brewminate.com/spanish-treasure-fleets-from-the-16th... https://www.mexconnect.com/articles/248-the-pacific-route-to-the-orient/ https://www.mexconnect.com/articles/248-the-pacific-route-to... https://uair.library.arizona.edu/item/294297 https://uair.library.arizona.edu/item/294297 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_treasure_fleet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_treasure_fleet https://www.nps.gov/subjects/teachingwithhistoricplaces/upload/Twhp-Lessons_Spanish-Treasure-Shipwrecks2006.pdf https://www.nps.gov/subjects/teachingwithhistoricplaces/uplo... https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/35458/how-long-did-it-take-mail-to-get-between-madrid-and-mexico https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/35458/how-long-d... https://www.dailysabah.com/columns/ekrem-bugra-ekinci/2015/08/14/the-spanish-treasure-lying-at-the-bottom-of-the-atlantic https://www.dailysabah.com/columns/ekrem-bugra-ekinci/2015/0... https://www.academia.edu/7744406/Analysis_of_the_Gulf_of_Mexicos_Veracruz_Havana_Route_of_La_Flota_de_la_Nueva_Espa%C3%B1a https://www.academia.edu/7744406/Analysis_of_the_Gulf_of_Mex...
• poulsbohemian 4y ago
  Currently listening to Peter Zeehan's The End of the World is Just the Beginning and this seems to jive with his viewpoint as well. That is - the geographic location of a country, plus rivers, plus ocean ports, is the core characteristic of those empires that succeeded or failed. He talks about a "cruchy exterior, creamy middle" IE: borders that are protected in some way, for example by an ocean, with an interior of vast farmland easily passable by roads and rail.
• culi 4y ago
  I read "teleportation technologies" and I thought this was gonna be a piece on the decade-long-planned magic update of dwarf fortress
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