Will Hoyt gives some recommendations for further reading consequent to his "The Flaw in Jefferson's Idea of Ward Republics":

In addition to not-yet-discredited, still enormously helpful mid-20th century works like Henri Pirenne’s Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe and Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society, Vols. I & II, there is a relatively recent book by Witold Kula called Measures and Men, which is a history of the shift from medieval to modern ways of measuring. As for studies that discuss the significance of the 1785 Land Act in these wider sorts of contexts, I would recommend Andro Linklater’s very fine Measuring America (Penguin, 2003). Linklater’s subtitle reads as follows: “How the United States Was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History”.