Finally, as their domains became larger and more populous, they ran into the limitations of direct rule and reluctantly had to share power with administration specialists, the bureaucrats. Our analysis of a worldwide sample of historical societies has determined that polities with populations of up to a few hundred thousand could be ruled by chiefs and their retinues without full-time administrators.[4] But once you have a million or more subjects, you either acquire a civil service or suffer from such inefficiencies that your polity sooner or later collapses. Or loses in competition with
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