I'm actually kind of surprised at this, now that I think of it. Clearly there have been numerous people who have wanted to take over the world, and there have been several individuals or empires that have taken over significant fractions of the world. Are there any careful systematic studies that try to explain why no individual or group has ever (yet) succeeded? Is there some set of general theories that even attempts to explain this, in part or in whole, in a systematic way?
I feel like such a study might be quite valuable for a lot of different reasons, in addition to being interesting in it's own right.
Communication as a constraint (along with transportation as a constraint), strikes me as important, but it seems like this pushes the question to "Why didn't anyone figure out how to control something that's more than a couple weeks away by courier?"
I suspect that, as Gwern suggests, making copies of oneself is sufficient to solve this, at least for a major outlier like Napoleon. So maybe another version of the answer is something like "Nobody solved the principle-agent problem well enough to get by on communication slower than a couple weeks". But it stil... (read more)