Graeber / Wengrow 29-30: "over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European governments gradually came to adopt the idea that every government should properly preside over a population of largely uniform language and culture, run by a bureaucratic officaldom trained in the liberal arts whose members had succeeded in passing competence exams"
"nothing remotely like that had existed in any previous period of European history. Yet it was almost exactly the system that had existed for centuries in China"