Technic History Collections

A short story collection is not usually a "short stories plus also one novel" collection. If Poul Anderson's The Earth Book Of Stormgate had not included The Man Who Counts, then the latter would have been the first volume in the Technic History, preceding even Trader To The Stars. The first person narrator of the concluding story in Trader... describes Nicholas van Rijn as:

"...the single-handed conqueror of Borthu, Diomedes, and t'Kela!"

-Poul Anderson, "The Master Key" IN Anderson, Trader To The Stars (New York, 1964), pp. 115-159 AT p. 121 -

- thus explicitly referring to the contents both of the previous two stories in the collection and of the novel. 

Why is "Esau," published in 1970, placed before "Hiding Place," published 1961, in the Chronology of Technic Civilization? This puts "Esau" between The Man Who Counts and "Hiding Place," the first story in Trader...

The first two volumes, Trader... and The Trouble Twisters, are specifically about van Rijn and Falkayn respectively and therefore would not have included any chronologically earlier stories about other characters which in any case were not written until later and therefore could not have been included.