[jernfrost]

I you look at world geography you can see that large tracts of plains seem to support large empires. E.g. consider the Russian Empire, the Mongolia and various Arab empires. They also support strong central governments.

In contrast Europe has a lot of rivers, mountains and forrest dividing the lands naturally.

E.g. you can see this replay itself at every level, e.g. within Scandinavia, flat Denmark had a stronger central government than Sweden early on. While e.g. my home country Norway full of fjords, rivers and forests always had very weak central power. Nobody could easily hold such a country.

I think the good part of that though is that such a situation foster democracy. These large plain countries always seem to end up strong but autocratic. I don't think there is any accident that Russia lagged behind the rest of Europe in freedom and development of democracy.

Switzerland is another example of a mountain country with strong democracy traditions and also historically very hard to keep control over by central powers.

Now China does of course have lots of maintains as well, but it matters how they are distributed. They still got quite large plains. I think there was a simulation ran, which simulated the creation of empires just based on geography and China was far more likely to produce empire's with its geography than Europe.