Dance to the Music of Time, by Nicolas Poussin (Date: 1634)
For no other society in history can we say without equivocation that its origin lay in the guiding hand of economic forces. The demands of agriculture are what initially motivated the inventions of administration — experimentation with land and water management, the invention and refinement of tools for production, the processes of producing these tools, organisational modes of coordinating labour in larger scale enterprises, the preservation and storage of harvested goods, and means of recording and regulating commercial exchange of goods within and across borders.
When the principle of administration had been discovered, and once domestic units of sociopolitical and economic organisation had been transformed by the possibilities that administration offered, the incentives existed for further technological invention and technical innovation which expanded the scope of administrative action in ways that transformed governance a…