Part II
How We Ended Up Here
How surplus, cities, institutions, identity and administration allow larger communities to organize power.
The reading path
Chapters in this part
- 05Why Did We Stop Chasing Food?Agriculture was not simply progress: it bound communities to land, created surpluses, property and new vulnerabilities. It supplied the material foundation for cities, specialists, taxes and states. 16 min read
- 06How Do You Govern a City?As a community grows, personal memory is no longer enough. Writing, accounting, archives, granaries and administration become technologies of power. 16 min read
- 07Why Do Empires Arise?Persia, Rome and imperial China show why conquest can increase resources and security—and why every new conquest makes a system harder and more expensive to control. 11 min read
- 08How Far Can You Really Command?Conquest is not government. Roads, messengers, horses and administrative networks show how the speed of information helps determine the possible scale of a state. 16 min read
- 09Why Do Millions of Strangers Feel Part of the Same World?Empires are not held together by armies and taxes alone. Beliefs, rules, languages and identities allow people who will never meet to imagine themselves as part of the same order. 16 min read