How transportation technologies shaped empires
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How transportation technologies shaped empires
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Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#2My understanding is that the British Raj was several months away from London?
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#3The 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 much more feasible today, thanks to modern travel, communications, and surveillance technologies.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#4What 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?
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#5My understanding is that the British Raj was several months away from London?
Let alone that the Portuguese were in Brazil, and the Spanish in the _Philippines_, for some 300 years
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#6This neatly explains Afghanistan, i think. Fundamentally unnavigable for the entirety of written history!
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#7The article mentions but doesn't discuss Mesoamerican empires. I think those should have some interesting idiosyncracies. There was a total absence of horses/oxes/draft animals before the Columbian exchange, so transportation and notions of geographic distance might have been very different.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#8What 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?
"The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line."
Delegation of authority seems to partially help solve the problem.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#9Ghengis Khan, Queen Victoria, and Alexander the Great have entered the chat.
Re: How transportation technologies shaped empires
#10What 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 into the 30 day window for a single month.