When we think of premodern governance, we often default to an image of concentrated authority: imposing rulers presiding over intricately layered hierarchies—pharaohs, emperors, and kings whose power seemed inseparable from the territorial and demographic scale of the states they commanded. This imagery reinforces a widely held assumption in both scholarship and popular discourse: as societies grow larger and more complex, political authority naturally centralizes, producing autocrats whose power is both extensive and entrenched.