231–240 of 313 posts
I'm wondering how to apply this in my life. People -> Should the contracted teams I work with have more frequent or deeper touch points? Can I make it even easier for customers and strangers to contact me? Do I generally signal that I'm open and willing to listen to the people in my life? Places -> Is there a convenient way to get around town that I'm neglecting? Ideas -> How can I create rapid channels of info from…
Travel time is more important in wartime. It's quite hard to conquer a place if your supply lines are too long. But if you do conquer, you can hold it for a long time with much less effort. I found this part of the article to be nonsense: Alexander the Great conquered most of the “known world” of his day. But his conquests took them 10 years, and after his death, the empire was split in six. Which further proves that…
Portugal conquered Goa in 1510 -- that's more than a month of travel. The Netherlands conquering Java in 1619? A lot more than a month. And these conquests lasted for centuries.
“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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the article literally argues that the British loss of the American colonies in 1776 is an example of how an empire can’t retain territory at a month’s remove. To which the existence of British colonies in Canada after 1776 is kind of a direct rejoinder, right? The eventual loss of those colonies is irrelevant to the point that you can’t explain the American revolution as being an inevitable consequence of remoten…
An empire can't retain hostile and unpacified territory beyond a certain limit - which may be set by time, communications, access to local resources and imported logistics, other factors, and all of the above. If the territory is fully pacified with no significant resistance and/or it's run by dedicated loyalists with plentiful local resources the limit doesn't apply. Basically an empire can only retain territory aga…
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…
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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…
"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…
This neatly explains Afghanistan, i think. Fundamentally unnavigable for the entirety of written history!
This is another click-baity title submission which doesn't remotely match the title of the source ("How Transportation Technologies Shaped Empires") :(