Take Earth in the late 19th century. - Industrializing democracies and *de-facto* constitutional monarchies like the UK and US east coast. Industrialists, bankers, engineers. - Frontier sectors where "the cavalry" hunts down natives like the US West or southern Africa. Cowboys, settlers, bandits and sheriffs. - A great bureaucatized monarchy in China. A different autocracy in Japan, with different outcomes. - Small tribal units in much of Africa, not explored by the rest of the world (which wrote the maps). However, the industrializing countries from the first bullet point did have a global reach, and the others did not. As the poem went > Whatever happens, we have got > > The Maxim gun, and they have not. Hilaire Belloc, The Modern Traveller