Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? To answer these questions, anthropologist David Graeber - one of the most prominent and provocative thinkers working today - takes a journey through ancient and modern history to trace the peculiar and fascinating evolution of bureaucracy over the ages. He starts in the ancient world, looking at how early civilisations were organised and what traces early bureaucratic systems have left in the ethnographic literature.
