How far what a state can do, and where it stops, is set by physical conditions nobody votes on, such as food output, the speed of transport and population, and by external dependencies that a single ban can cut off, rather than by the choices of its rulers. This is my suspicion, not a settled conclusion; I test it point by point against states whose course has run, as a reference for the one still running.
Lays out, layer by layer, the material and technical conditions a state runs on, marking what each layer depends on and how long it can hold.
Nullroute · Data and toolsAround 1900 the share of receipts that British railways spent on working rose from about 56% to 64% and never came back. Costs, rates and train loads are compared across fourteen large companies: coal and wages rose, the 1894 Act kept rates from rising, and the companies ran fewer trains and loaded them more heavily.
Nullroute · Data and toolsIn key supply chains such as semiconductors, cloud infrastructure and energy, who really holds the link others cannot get around, what keeps that control in place, and where it moves once challenged. Each chokepoint gets the same table: what is controlled, how goods and money flow, who is contesting it, and which public document the evidence comes from.
When one side loses a visible chokepoint, a control, a supply line, a seat in an international body, does its capacity for control really disappear, or does it move to a less transparent position closer to the infrastructure? Seventeen incidents between China and the United States since 2016, with the official responses to each, are coded one by one to test whether the shift has a consistent direction.
From the late Qing to the Republic, how many times did a sum of money or a consignment of goods travelling from Shanghai to Hankou have to pay fees, change units of account and wait, and for how many days? The costs and delays along this real route are set beside the political borders on the map to see whether they coincide. The material is item-by-item freight rates, exchange charges and duties from shipping records and the Maritime Customs trade reports.
Twenty will-it-happen questions about the same pair of powers are each given a probability three ways, from historical base rates alone, from a few slow-moving structural variables, and from the researcher's overall judgment; when the window closes, the three are compared to see which is clearly more accurate.
From 1868 the Board of Trade required every British railway company to return three flows each year, capital, traffic and receipts, until 1912. These figures are transcribed and checked company by company and year by year to see that the totals add up, to find institutions that are written down nowhere in the accounts but show in how the three flows change, such as the conditions under which limits on rates actually took effect.