I'm part-way through "By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia" [0] and it does a fantastic job of illustrating the significance of markets in the ancient world. One tidbit that struck me as particularly interesting was that the appearance of the earliest civilizations in the near east demanded resources from other areas, notably the caucuses and beyond, which caused the emergence of more advanced civilizations in those regions as well--and similarly, when a given near-east civilization declined or collapsed, the satellite civilization declined or collapsed as well. In general, I'm always surprised that enormous markets existed before nation states, animal husbandry, before metallurgy, and even before agriculture itself. People were trading obsidian or other resources back into the stone age. I guess I always thought of widespread trade networks as a later development--something that depended upon (not preceded) the existence of agriculture, metallurgy, or nation states.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Steppe-Desert-Ocean-Birth-Eurasia/dp/...

One useful first step in becoming a better writer - in particular if your subject is complex - is to to delete your Twitter account and never look at another Twitter thread. Character limits kill creativity and complexity.

The presentation does leave out one very necessary requirement for becoming a good-to-great writer: you have to do a lot of reading. If you're going to write about a complex scientific or technical subject, you should have some examples in mind of great texts that you've read. What did other writers do that you liked or that stuck with you? Equally true, what are some really bad examples, some things to avoid?

For example, here's what I think is an excellent popular history book, and if I ever wrote something with a historical bent, I'd flip though it first: "By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia" by Barry Cunliffe

https://www.amazon.com/Steppe-Desert-Ocean-Birth-Eurasia/dp/...

The point about Twitter is really this: you have to develop the skill of composing a paragraph as a coherent entity in order to become a decent writer, and Twitter doesn't allow for paragraphs, just sentences (and short ones at that). Paragraphs should have an internal cohesion to help the reader absorb the concept being presented. Once you have that, you can start chaining paragraphs together, reordering the sequence of paragraphs, with the goal of constructing a path that the reader can follow through the whole essay or chapter. Getting the order right is important for complex topics, as point D might rely on a good understanding of points A and B, and so on. Your goal should be to make the reader feel smart.

Of course that's just advice for non-fiction writing; if you're doing fiction or poetry basically anything goes. The public might like it or hate it, but the literary critics can safely be ignored.