There's also "The Dispossessed", where an anarchist movement travels to a distant planet in order to set up their own government.
I'm pretty sure I get what you mean but I found that funny.
The Dispossessed describes an anarchist society on the impoverished moon of a verdant planet, and a scientist's struggle to reconcile his anarchism with his wish to further his research, which requires more resources than the anarchist society can provide. It is one of my favourite books.
I also don't remember distant communication being relevant for The Word for World is Forest. That's far more about the conflict between the natives and the colonizers, and passive vs. aggressive societies.
And then when they get the ansible midway through the story along with an inspection party that promptly reports their findings back to Earth, they start getting a steady stream of orders banning their various practices - slavery, violent reprisals etc. And when the local administration tries to implement some of those bans, the more hard-minded colonists deliberately provoke the natives into an open uprising by massacring their village. So it's a major plot driver, too.
C.f. the immigration-friendly early U.S. and its "close borders" and PR lottery approaches of today.
The rule seems too simplistic. What's so special about 1 month? Is the significant value time to communicate or time to move military forces?
For instance, for your hypothetical interplanetary empire: How could a capital, with a military that can move at 1% light speed, effectively rule over a colony one light month away if the worst it could do for ten years is send a nasty letters over radio?
Nearly the only law is that you don't impede the mail system, and that you pay a small tax to support the fleet that will hammer you into the ground if you impede the mail.
One problem with that idea is that either the king's forces would be spread very thin or they would be massively (and expensively) oversized.
> Just make most of your economy based on mass manufacturing weapons and vehicles, problem solved
That feels like "solution" that you spent little more time thinking through than it took you to write it. Those kind of things both unconvincing and have a very high probability of being wrong. I mean, you don't even mention trade-offs and there are obvious historical parallels that call your solution into question. Isn't one of the (many) reasons the Soviet Union collapsed is that is allocated too much of its economic capacity to military expenditures?
A 50 year trip isn’t such a big deal if people are living 100,000 years and have near perfect memory.
> The rule seems too simplistic. What's so special about 1 month? Is the significant value time to communicate, time to move military forces, or something else?
> For instance, for your hypothetical interplanetary empire: How could a capital, with a military that can move at 1% light speed, effectively rule over a colony one light month away if the worst it could do for ten years is send a nasty letters over radio? Having local forces isn't a good answer, because one of the easier paths to rebellion is for the leader(s) those forces to declare independence and make themselves kings.
Have assassins embedded in their chain of command, so poison or dagger is always just few metres away. And they know how short their rein as a king will be.
> Have assassins embedded in their chain of command, so poison or dagger is always just few metres away. And they know how short their rein as a king will be.
I don't think that would be as effective as you think it would be. Why would your assassin be any more loyal than the other garrison forces? Especially when he's ten years away from any help or evacuation.
It seems less than unsound. It's barely a just-so story.
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.
A lot of people would argue that ~half the world is part of the US empire today...
In that the US has power to strongly influence/make decisions in about half the world, extradite people from about half the world, and enforce IP/anti drug/monetary controls in about half the world.
And by some definitions, it might be 80% of the world.
* 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.