151–160 of 313 posts
Ghengis 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...
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Have you read much Le Guin by any chance? This is a theme I've seen in her work.
Could you mention some books?
There's also "The Dispossessed", where an anarchist movement travels to a distant planet in order to set up their own government.
“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.
There is quite a difference between conquering (and thereby assimilating) versus killing almost all natives and then populating the place with your own settlers..
The native population was not killed but rather decimated by disease. Pre-colonial population of North America was on the order of 60 million - there was zero chance European powers being able to hold that size of population over a period of time. Contrast that to Africa, which today has a minimal population of European descendants ... because that native population had immunity.
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…
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?
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…
Which bodes poorly for increasing federal power in the US.
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You are right of course but I think Canada is a pretty unique case. Canada exists in huge part because of the american revolution. British-american loyalists have basically founded upper Canada, which is now Ontario, so it makes sense that they were particularly close to the throne and the British homeland and government. French-canada was also just recently conquered and placated by the Quebec Act, but still tried a…
The influx of loyalists was a couple of generations before the 1837 rebellions in both Upper and Lower Canada. Yet another generation elapsed before home rule with responsible government was devolved from Westminster and a few more before Canada was considered "independent" from the centralized Empire by the Statute of Westminster in 1931. A century is a pretty long time for your argument about the beliefs of some in…
The loyalists shaped the relationship Canada had with britain, and while I'd guess even their descendants were a minority (relative to immigrants) by the mid 19th century, it still defined Canadian identity even to this day. If Canada hadn't seen that initial influx of usually rich, upper class loyalists that became the founding stock of upper canadian politics/elite, we might have had a very, very different outcome. One that is more in line with most other colonies in the New World.
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There is quite a difference between conquering (and thereby assimilating) versus killing almost all natives and then populating the place with your own settlers..
>versus killing almost all natives and then populating the place with your own settlers.. The native population was not killed but rather decimated by disease. Pre-colonial population of North America was on the order of 60 million - there was zero chance European powers being able to hold that size of population over a period of time. Contrast that to Africa, which today has a minimal population of European descenda…
Does this rule works for information signal speed in general? Does empire in space cannot be large than 1 month light in radius?
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>versus killing almost all natives and then populating the place with your own settlers.. The native population was not killed but rather decimated by disease. Pre-colonial population of North America was on the order of 60 million - there was zero chance European powers being able to hold that size of population over a period of time. Contrast that to Africa, which today has a minimal population of European descenda…
That’s a funny definition of ‘not killed’ you’re using.