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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.