For the dromocratic State, mastery over the earth is already the mastery over its dimensions.
The ancient cadastral law prolonged nothing else, as Colonel Barrader writes in Fossatum Africae: "Centuriation is the very foundation of mass education, of their civilization . . . the indelible trace of a possession-taking that divides to conquer. " This indelible dichotomy is the one that exists between the nature of the movingpower of invasion and that of the landowner's (or sedentary worker-producer's) relative inability to move, to displace himself, attached as he is to his little parcel of land; the dichotomy between the geography of the inhabitant and that of the passer-by. The trace of the Roman path is usually no more than a continuous line, held over from the general schema of centuriation. Thus everything is simple: the military State is on the road, the payment of the cadastral tax is evaluated by the meter coverable, and thus defendable, we could say, by the army, the troop of horsemen, "that luxury-people."
The semi-colonial function has always been a protection racket in which the productive mass' safety is guaranteed by the tribute, remuneration for efective technological surveillance of the territory. In the same way, the Carolingian administration will be one that "straddles" for the benefit of a dromocratic State, which is careful not to demolish its internal constitution by founding hereditary land laws, or even by enlarging the royal domains (except for those that lie along the great vectors-the Meuse, for example-where its morphology "naturally" resides) in an attempt to lay its hands on all media, religious ideologies, money, knowledge, external commerce, modes of transportation and information, etc.
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I Speed and Politics