Our conventional vision of #WorldHistory is a checker board of cities, #Empires, and kingdoms. But in fact for most of [the past,] these were exceptional islands of #PoliticalHierarchy surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants, if visible at all to historians eyes, are variously described as "tribal confederacies," "anfictiones," or, if you're an anthropologist, "segmentary societies." [That is,] people who systematically avoided fixed systems of #Authority.
–The Dawn of Everything