Ghengis Khan, Queen Victoria, and Alexander the Great have entered the chat.
Eventually collapsed. Collapsed eventually. Collapsed immediately upon his death.
All empires collapse eventually.
How transportation technologies shaped empires
21–30 of 313 posts
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#22This 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_inst...
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#23This will significantly limit humanity's ambitions to colonize outer space.
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.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#24My understanding is that the British Raj was several months away from London?
Let alone that the Portuguese were in Brazil, and the Spanish in the _Philippines_, for some 300 years
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.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#25This will significantly limit humanity's ambitions to colonize outer space.
Depends on the velocity. 1 light month is pretty big.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#26[deleted]
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#27“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.
>we forget about the existence of the control case: Canada.
Is it though? England did lose Canada to home-rule. In fact, I contend that a major reason why a newly independent (but also broke and fledgling) Canada was not annexed by the US was mainly because of the American preoccupation with civil war and Reconstruction, and the diplomatic efforts of John A. Macdonald.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#28By this logic, the Mars colonies will be independent.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#29Ghengis Khan, Queen Victoria, and Alexander the Great have entered the chat.
Eventually collapsed. Collapsed eventually. Collapsed immediately upon his death.
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.)
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#30Ghengis Khan, Queen Victoria, and Alexander the Great have entered the chat.
The Macedonian and Mongolian Empires shattered into more manageable bits almost immediately.
For Victorian Britain: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Isochron...
