The impact of transportation on the long-term construction of centralized and decentralized socio-historical power structures

This study is a longue durée reading that traces the distance trajectory in which transportation technology and organization allowed central powers to form from the first state formations to the First World War. Focusing on the geography of the Near East and the peripheral points of this field, the study discusses how distance empowered the powerful and how it enabled decentralized powers to rise as the center themselves. Influenced by the evaluations of historians, historical sociologists and archaeologists such as William McNeill, Michael Mann, Charles Tilly and Eric Cline on state capacity and distance, the study generally uses primary period sources for its source material (in order to interpret how the idea of ​​distance of the period was constructed through first-hand experience). In modern narratives, the powers that are considered as omnipotent and omniscient are often unable to collect taxes directly or, even when they do, cannot reach marginal geographies, and when they use military force to demonstrate their existence or allocate a bureaucratic access trajectory, they are crushed under the burden of distance and financial weight of it, and their "central" appearance is not truly territorial, but structures that can only exist when state officials of questionable reliability are present in the region. Although the communication and transportation opportunities provided by the telegraph and railways in the 19th century have brought central powers to an unprecedented state coercion opportunity in history, the spread of these technologies and organizations has ensured that the central power is not unrivaled. The rule-making distances of central states were present so long as the supply routes favored them, and this study evaluates how transportation creates a power trajectory through longue durée.