The Inca Empire

In under a century, the Inca built the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas, binding the length of the Andes together with 25,000 miles of roads, storehouses against famine, and a labor tax that citizens paid in work rather than money. Remarkably, they ran this vast, centrally planned state with no writing and no wheels, keeping their records instead on knotted cords called quipu. It is state formation stripped to its essence: the sheer organizing power of a determined bureaucracy over a whole civilization.