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How transportation technologies shaped empires

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Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#171

Post by macspoofing »

meatyloafy wrote: post #169
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They died, but they were indeed not killed. You may say something flowery like "the diseases killed them", or "the arrival of the Brits killed them", but the British empire or its subjects did not kill the vast, vast majority of Native North Americans who died as a consequence of their arrival.

They were killed by what the settlers brought with them. No, it was not deliberate (#), but nevertheless, their arrival is what killed most of the natives. (#) Obviously the settlers would have preferred to keep the natives alive since then they would not have needed to ship vast quantities of Africans across the ocean to enslave, but could have just done that with the locals.

>They were killed by what the settlers brought with them. No, it was not deliberate (#), but nevertheless, their arrival is what killed most of the natives.

That's all I meant to clarify. You'd be surprised how many people today actually think that the native population was wiped out through deliberate and intentional action. Your wording made it seem you believed that as well, but that seemed to not be the case.

>Obviously the settlers would have preferred to keep the natives alive since then they would not have needed to ship vast quantities

That's a caricature.

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#173

Post by bobthepanda »

derefr wrote: post #145
manv1 wrote: post #132

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…

> 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…

There’s an old Chinese proverb for this that’s pretty succinct:

“The mountains are tall and the emperor is far away.”

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#174

Post by notahacker »

dalbasal wrote: post #109

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…

> 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.

I think you could get a job writing excuses for Roman emperors ;)

The Romans might have assimilated some sophisticated civilizations like Greece and Carthage, but outposts like Britannia were nothing like that, and Romans built their own roads and cities and villas to extract wealth from the land and set up their own institutions everywhere they went. Germany had no shortage of potential as a source of agricultural produce and slaves, but what made it uneconomical compared with other fringe parts is the pesky Germans kept fighting back, and in particular wiped out the three remaining legions in Germania after eight others sent there to pacify it had been withdrawn to stave off rebellions elsewhere. (They lost a legion to Boudica in Britain too, but they'd built roads and cities there by that time and had a different emperor calling the shots).

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#175

Post by notch656c »

jameshart wrote: post #24
karatinversion wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#176

Post by 8note »

macspoofing wrote: post #171
meatyloafy wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were killed by what the settlers brought with them. No, it was not deliberate (#), but nevertheless, their arrival is what killed most of the natives. (#) Obviously the settlers would have preferred to keep the natives alive since then they would not have needed to ship vast quantities of Africans across the ocean to enslave, but could have just done that with the locals.

>They were killed by what the settlers brought with them. No, it was not deliberate (#), but nevertheless, their arrival is what killed most of the natives. That's all I meant to clarify. You'd be surprised how many people today actually think that the native population was wiped out through deliberate and intentional action. Your wording made it seem you believed that as well, but that seemed to not be the case. >Ob…

It was intentional though. The bison didn't disappear because of western disease, they were hunted out to break up the natives ability to resist, so they could be killed and corralled, and the land be granted to settlers.

Canada intentionally withheld food it owed to natives as part of treaty agreements, with the understanding that if a bunch of people starved to death, Canada wouldn't need to send as much food.

Similarly, disease was spread intentionally through small pox blankets, with the intention listed

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#177

Post by jimmytidey »

Balgair wrote: post #168
jimmytidey wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Drunk the cool aid..." In the UK case I've heard the idea that the Publc School system emerged for exactly this reason. ('Public' schools being the most elite schools in the UK). A relatively small number of schools shaped a class of people who all thought in exactly the same way, so they would behave predictably even when far away and in a new context. Public schools, are not coincidentally noted for a focus on 'pl…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSGWoXDFM64

Amazing reference!

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#178

Post by notch656c »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #166
kgeist wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

What lands are de facto Canada but not de jure Canada's?

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#179

Post by jimmytidey »

notch656c wrote: post #170
jimmytidey wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Drunk the cool aid..." In the UK case I've heard the idea that the Publc School system emerged for exactly this reason. ('Public' schools being the most elite schools in the UK). A relatively small number of schools shaped a class of people who all thought in exactly the same way, so they would behave predictably even when far away and in a new context. Public schools, are not coincidentally noted for a focus on 'pl…

Being trustworthy seems like an important trait in the older agrarian societies that depended on long-term planning and exchange, whether you were a farmer or an administrator.

Yes, although I'm not sure they had the capacity to institutionalise eduction to that end.

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#180

Post by unsui »

Balgair wrote: post #168
jimmytidey wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Drunk the cool aid..." In the UK case I've heard the idea that the Publc School system emerged for exactly this reason. ('Public' schools being the most elite schools in the UK). A relatively small number of schools shaped a class of people who all thought in exactly the same way, so they would behave predictably even when far away and in a new context. Public schools, are not coincidentally noted for a focus on 'pl…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSGWoXDFM64

I've never seen the source, but was reminded of this excellent homage: - https://youtu.be/BQXbbWVJ4sA?t=133
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