Pre-modern tribute systems weakened themselves the more they expanded

Evidence

Typically, a powerful central household imposed levies on less powerful regional households, which in turn imposed obligations on those around them. Revenues flowing towards the center were liable to leak at each juncture and could be increased only by further expansion outward, which weakened the network by adding further points of leakage. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 20

Categorization

• SEED: A neat structural explanation of why expansionary tribute empires self-erode — usable in an essay on organizational diseconomies of scale.
• XREF: Connects to network-theory treatments of why adding nodes to a loosely-coupled system raises leakage and coordination costs. — connects to: Attempted revivals of past traditions accelerate their decay — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1454