This will significantly limit humanity's ambitions to colonize outer space.
How transportation technologies shaped empires
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Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#12“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.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#13“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.
And even more so, re: distance, Australia.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#14What 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?
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…
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.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#15“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.
Or Spain and South America?
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#17The 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 muc…
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.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#18Ghengis Khan, Queen Victoria, and Alexander the Great have entered the chat.
Eventually collapsed.
Collapsed eventually.
Collapsed immediately upon his death.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#19Ghengis Khan, Queen Victoria, and Alexander the Great have entered the chat.
he addressed all those didn't he?
"Queen Victoria, Chinese Gordon is on line one. Shall I tell him to hold?"
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#20Interesting, but almost all the examples are from before the invention of the telegraph.