One thing I have noticed, however, is a dramatic lack of continuity in the history of note taking within the longue durée of Western civilization. (Other cultures including oral cultures have similar traditions, but for our purposes here, I won’t go into them except to say that they’re highly valuable, spectacularly rich, and something of which we should all be aware.)

opportunities for privacy are crucial for any creative or complex thinking, and workers who never have stable space of their own are less productive, less confident, and less happy than workers who do.

For whatever reason, Graeber and Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything, ridicule this finding and assert – without evidence – that cities with large populations can be governed effectively without rulers, managers or bureaucrats.

They emphasise grass-roots actions, where people gather to make decisions together in small groups. But there is another type of generative process – spontaneous order – in which social change arises as the byproduct of interactions among individuals.

“The oldest town plan in existence” says Jeremy Harwood in To the Ends of the Earth: 100 Maps that Changed the World. “The oldest authenticated map in the world” says J.B. Harley in the UNESCO Courier. Of maps, it is, says Catherine Delano Smith in Imago Mundi, “the oldest known.”  “The Catal Huyuk map … is perhaps 2000 years older than the oldest known writing system and 4000 or more years older than the oldest known alphabetical writing system…” says James Blaut in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Heck, I even towed the party line in my introductory maps course lecture on the history of mapping.

Strawberry Hill was a confection, a mock-castle of a fake dynasty complete with a reproduction baronial hall, flourishing the arms and images of putative crusader ancestors on the ceiling.