If this is interesting to folks, there's an entire book on this sort of phenomenon, "Seeing like a State" (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/20186.Seeing_L

If this is interesting to folks, there's an entire book on this sort of phenomenon, "Seeing like a State" (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/20186.Seeing_Like_a_State https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/20186.Seeing_Like_a_S...). It talks about why land parcels are squares (instead of strip farming, where fertile land was shared by many families), how we arrived at current measurement units and not "a basketful of grapes", standardization of monetary units, and a ton more. Excellent book.