"The question, then, is why monarchy may have provided an efficient solution to the problem of order in some periods but not in others"
"In any society, there will be many aspirants for the position of sovereign." Supporters of a winner may do much better than supporters of a loser.
We argue that a monarchical system of rule is best equipped to solve this coordination dilemma in disconnected societies, where obstacles to coordination are greatest. This explains its appeal in the premodern world, where most citizens were illiterate, spoke a babble of tongues, rarely encountered those outside their locality, and consequently had little sense of belonging to a larger community (Crone 1989). These features, in turn, were by-products of the diffuseness of human settlement, poor communications and transportation infrastructure, and languages that were unwritten or largely untaught. For these reasons, populations in premodern societies were not closely interconnected and the flow of information was glacial. In a disconnected society of this sort, monarchy offered a workable solution to society’s coordination problem.
However, "As societies became more interconnected other methods of leadership selection became more viable."
A monarch could provide "(a) political legitimacy, (b) orderly succession, (c) unity, (d) long time horizons, and (e) the ability to impose law and order."
The authors discuss alternatives in their Appendix A.
"Personal dictatorships were quite successful in conquering substantial swaths of territory. However, a dictator with no connection to a royal or divine family – a commoner, in other words – was not well-positioned to establish connections to traditional practices and belief-systems."
"Among institutionalized forms of rule we may distinguish between monarchy and corporate regimes, which might be further classified as democratic or oligarchic but were in either case generally centered on an assembly."
This sort of power was apt to seem prosaic (lacking in supernatural sanction) and ineffectual. No special legitimacy flows from this sort of power unless and until a direct connection between leaders and citizens can be established, an achievement that awaited modern systems of transport and communications (allowing leaders to communicate directly with citizens) and political parties (allowing interests to be effectively aggregated). Corporate forms of governance in the pre-modern era generally did not provide an efficient method for identifying and empowering an executive, one who could keep order and issue authoritative decisions. Nor could they solve the perennial problem of succession.
That's why premodern republics were mostly city-states, whether democratic or oligarchic ones. "When corporate forms of governance were successful their purview was generally limited to a small territory and to urban settings, where people lived close together and thus experienced a high level of connectedness, allowing coordination difficulties to be overcome."
Then "The Roman republic/empire appears to be the only sizeable polity that managed to maintain a non-
monarchical form of government over a long period of time."
The Roman Empire was close to these authors' definition of monarchy, except for emperors not having well-defined hereditary succession.
One could transmit information over long distances at the speed of light, by using signal fires and signal smoke and the like, but the bandwidth was typically less than a baud (1 bit/s).
The fastest one could travel on land was from riding a horse at full run, but horses get tired, and the only way to sustain such a speed over long distances was to use a horse relay system. A rider would ride his horse to a relay station, exchange his tired horse for a rested horse, then continue onwards.
"It is telling that in those rare occasions where parliaments managed to wrest partial control from monarchs, the writ of the monarch was still required to legitimate rule over subject peoples beyond the home turf of the parliament." - like in Britain.
List of monarchies
