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How transportation technologies shaped empires

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

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Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#91

Post by Quarrelsome »

lkrubner wrote: post #61

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.

sure but I imagine the argument here is that the grip on power of provinces so far away was considerably weak and likely to an extent devolved to the local agents of the crown. And likely as long as the ships with goods sailed limited questions were asked and limited checks occurred.

I imagine that those who worked on the colonial extents of the Empire were given the largest freedoms to be monstrous as long as it benefitted the crown. I would even argue that the cultural descendants of these agents are the same forces that encourage ideas such as Brexit; hoping to return to times of significantly less oversight from the home nation. As an example of this internal discord between territories of European empires and home states I think the abolition of slavery in the 19th century was a scenario where the electorate didn't align with these colonial interests to create an internal discord. Agents then shifted to an evil interpretation of contract law to replace slaves with indentured servants. I appreciate that this might not seem immediately irrelevant but I hope it might show how a discord between the competing interests of the society at "home" and the society "abroad" might slowly result in the "transport time" fractures this article discusses as the interests of the two populations diverge.

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#92

Post by meatyloafy »

jameshart wrote: post #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.

There is quite a difference between conquering (and thereby assimilating) versus killing almost all natives and then populating the place with your own settlers..

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#93

Post by wintogreen74 »

mardifoufs wrote: post #62
jameshart wrote: post #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.

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…

I'm a 10th+ generation Canadian of German ancestry, whose relatives had both an affinity for the British Empire (initially fleeing persecution to England) and a practical one: rich farmland in exchange for fighting with the loyalists against the upstart colonists. It's hard to determine which had the bigger impact.

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#95

Post by Quarrelsome »

Excellent article generally but I don't think the point about Napoleon was very strong and rather diminished the article as it conflates the concept of military supply with Imperial administration and I think the two subjects differ in practice.

(i.e. in another reality where Napoleon had superior temporarily military supply in Russian held territories then he could have conquered Russia. If that happened; whether he could hold the territory for the years that follow would however be an argument for this article).

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#96

Post by imbnwa »

>This also helps explain for example why feudalism was so prevalent in Europe during the Middle Ages. Without well-maintained Roman roads, the time needed to go from one place to another extended, which made it that much harder to control big empires. Small, local warlords emerged. They were the ones with enough money to afford a horse and armor

This point is another reminder for me that Game of Thrones' Westeros, the Seven Kingdoms, should've collapsed the minute all the dragons were lost in the Dance of Dragons, particularly the North, where it takes months to get to Winterfell from King's Landing. This writer[0] also noted how impossible Westeros as a united entity should be along with other issues with GRRM's world design.

Nevermind that the size of Westeros should have a significant impact on its anthropology. This is a needlessly nerdy analysis, and most are aware of GRRM's well-known disclaimer about his faults, but no one even comments on anyone having an accent in Westeros, except for that of the Dornish (which is kinda sketch IMO).

* The relative isolation of the North and the Iron Islands would've seen them continue to speak and evolve the First Men's language, though with far more Andalic influence than the language spoken north of the Wall.

* Dorne would speak a spectrum that goes from the Andalic of the Marches to the Andalic/Rhoynish patois most people would speak in Sunspear

* The Sea Lords, much like the Channel Islands IRL, would've continued to speak a dialect of High Valyrian that would've had a strong Andalic influence and the Targaryens would've spoken this dialect. Its a bit strange that the Targaryens basically just stopped speaking Valyrian though where IRL it took the Normans, also a dominant political minority, almost 400 years to start speaking English conversationally. The royal court and the high lords would all have learned to speak it.

* The Riverlands' dialect would be most related to the Stormlands' dialect since the Storm King ruled there for 300 years.

* The Vale, also relatively isolated since its accessible over land through a scant few mountain passes, like Portugal and Spain IRL where Portuguese has more in common with vulgar Latin, would speak the 'purest' dialect of Andalic that has more in common with the Andalic that was spoken in Essos.

[0]https://medium.com/migration-issues/westeros-is-poorly-desig...

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#98

Post by notahacker »

cs702 wrote: post #3

The 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…

The logic is fine, it's just massively overstated with the clickbait headline, and travel time in a region is an endogenous factor which depends on where the boundaries of the empire are drawn, because empires build roads, chop down forests, drain swamps and make rivers navigable.

As the article acknowledges, travel times within the Roman Empire tended to be less than a month. But they conquered land regions (where possible) before they built the roads that let them supply them that fast. Certainly there's nothing about lowland Germany that should make it more difficult to reach than Hadrian's Wall, but they effectively subdued the British tribes and built roads all over that particular faraway island, and didn't have as much success against the Germanic tribes who inhabited desirable land closer to their capital that could have been reached in a shorter time with a nice lowland road from Gaul, if they'd ever been able to build it.

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#99

Post by somenameforme »

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 their government, the less likely they are to feel that it's "their" government or have any sort of shared "camaraderie" for lack of a better word.

There are plenty of examples of empires having at least tentacles stretched well beyond 3000 miles sustainably, even at the beckoning of the colonies, as in the case of e.g. Anguilla with the Brits. Yet no empire can maintain stability, regardless of their size, in the face of rising discontent.

Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires

#100

Post by meatyloafy »

tgv wrote: post #17
cs702 wrote: post #3

The 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.

Anybody dreaming of Mars colonies should keep that in mind. As long as the Mars colony will be dependent on supplies from Earth, they will do what Earth wants. Once they are self sufficient, this will change.

C.f. the immigration-friendly early U.S. and its "close borders" and PR lottery approaches of today.

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