This is a really excellent point, and I think cuts much closer to the truth than a simple lack of technology or capital.
If you think about the great infrastructure accomplishments of Rome: roads, aqueducts and sewer systems, rapid large-scale concrete construction, hypocausts, etc., then it seems to me that almost all of them were essentially scaled-up versions of domicile-level or urban-level technologies. These technologies could be piloted at a small scale and then scaled up if they proved to be worthwhile. The institutional mindset was almost totally civic rather than imperial. The military was something of an exception to this, and of course individual merchants and merchant companies would have been very much focused on keeping the gears of the empire turning. The roads and the granary systems were scaled-up urban technologies that helped the empire to function, but I'm not aware of any innovations at the empire level which didn't have some kind of urban precedent. Presumably there were no political or commercial institutions which were structured to support that kind of investment -- or even to ask those kind of questions.
The British thinking around empires was fundamentally very different. They genuinely thought AS an empire -- a highly distributed network rather than an overgrown city-state. This gave them the insight to support the creation of the semaphore system.
Perhaps a more interesting question, in my opinion, is why didn't the Chinese didn't invent the Internet? I'm not as knowledgeable about Chinese history, but my impression is that they were vastly better at thinking and acting like an empire -- not in the expansionist sense, but in the administrative sense. Presumably they would have had the kind of institutional basis to develop a network of semaphore towers. So what was the obstacle for them?
If you think about the great infrastructure accomplishments of Rome: roads, aqueducts and sewer systems, rapid large-scale concrete construction, hypocausts, etc., then it seems to me that almost all of them were essentially scaled-up versions of domicile-level or urban-level technologies. These technologies could be piloted at a small scale and then scaled up if they proved to be worthwhile. The institutional mindset was almost totally civic rather than imperial. The military was something of an exception to this, and of course individual merchants and merchant companies would have been very much focused on keeping the gears of the empire turning. The roads and the granary systems were scaled-up urban technologies that helped the empire to function, but I'm not aware of any innovations at the empire level which didn't have some kind of urban precedent. Presumably there were no political or commercial institutions which were structured to support that kind of investment -- or even to ask those kind of questions.
The British thinking around empires was fundamentally very different. They genuinely thought AS an empire -- a highly distributed network rather than an overgrown city-state. This gave them the insight to support the creation of the semaphore system.
Perhaps a more interesting question, in my opinion, is why didn't the Chinese didn't invent the Internet? I'm not as knowledgeable about Chinese history, but my impression is that they were vastly better at thinking and acting like an empire -- not in the expansionist sense, but in the administrative sense. Presumably they would have had the kind of institutional basis to develop a network of semaphore towers. So what was the obstacle for them?