The Square and the Tower: Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power

585 Pages·2017·19.11 MB·English

by  Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson

THE SQUARE AND THE TOWER
Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power
Contents
List of Plates
List of Illustrations
Preface: The Networked Historian
PART I
Introduction: Networks and Hierarchies
1. The Mystery of the Illuminati
2. Our Networked Age
3. Networks, Networks Everywhere
4. Why Hierarchies?
5. From Seven Bridges to Six Degrees
6. Weak Ties and Viral Ideas
7. Varieties of Network
8. When Networks Meet
9. Seven Insights
10. The Illuminati Illuminated
PART II
Emperors and Explorers
11. A Brief History of Hierarchy
12. The First Networked Age
13. The Art of the Renaissance Deal
14. Discoverers
15. Pizarro and the Inca
16. When Gutenberg Met Luther
PART III
Letters and Lodges
17. The Economic Consequences of the Reformation
18. Trading Ideas
19. Networks of Enlightenment
20. Networks of Revolution
PART IV
The Restoration of Hierarchy
21. The Red and the Black
22. From Crowd to Tyranny
23. Order Restored
24. The House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
25. The House of Rothschild
26. Industrial Networks
27. From Pentarchy to Hegemony
PART V
Knights of the Round Table
28. An Imperial Life
29. Empire
30. Taiping
31. ‘The Chinese Must Go’
32. The Union of South Africa
33. Apostles
34. Armageddon
PART VI
Plagues and Pipers
35. Greenmantle
36. The Plague
37. The Leader Principle
38. The Fall of the Golden International
39. The Ring of Five
40. Brief Encounter
41. Ella in Reform School
PART VII
Own the Jungle
42. The Long Peace
43. The General
44. The Crisis of Complexity
45. Henry Kissinger’s Network of Power
46. Into the Valley
47. The Fall of the Soviet Empire
48. The Triumph of Davos Man
49. Breaking the Bank of England
PART VIII
The Library of Babel
50. 9/11/2001
51. 9/15/2008
52. The Administrative State
53. Web 2.0
54. Coming Apart
55. Tweeting the Revolution
56. 11/9/2016
PART IX
Conclusion: Facing Cyberia
57. Metropolis
58. Network Outage
59. FANG, BAT and EU
60. The Square and the Tower Redux
Afterword: The Original Square and Tower
Illustrations
Appendix
References
Bibliography
Follow Penguin
‘If I broke [my silence], the strength would depart from me; but while I held
my peace, I held my foe in an invisible mesh.’
George MacDonald
List of Plates
1. The Last Judgment (mosaic), Italian School, eleventh century), Santa Maria
Assunta, Torcello, Venice. (Mondadori Portfolio/Archivio Magliani/Mauro
Magliani & Barbara Piovan/Bridgeman Images)
2. A Jacob Moreno ‘sociogram’.
3. The network of the friendships in a high school, from the National
Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health.
4. The United States federal government as a hierarchy, 1862.
5. The United States federal government as a hierarchy, c. 2010. (Reproduced
by permission of NetAge, Inc.)
6. The Piazza del Campo in Siena. (Martin Thomas Photography/Alamy Stock
Photo)
7. The Cantino planisphere (1502).
8. The St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots (Protestants), Paris,
1572.
9. Gerard ter Borch, Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, May 15, 1648.
10. 37,062 European locations, mapped on the basis of the birth and death data
of 120,211 notable individuals from 1069 BC to 2012 CE. (From Maximilian
Schich et al., ‘A Network Framework of Cultural History, Science, 345, 6196
(2014), 558–62, copyright © 2014 by the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, reprinted by permission of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science)
11. An eighteenth-century network. (From Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of
Empires (Princeton University Press, 2011), copyright © 2011 by Princeton
University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press)
12. George Washington as a Freemason (lithograph), American school,
nineteenth century. (private collection/Bridgeman Images)
13. ‘Le Gateau des Rois’ (hand-coloured engraving), French school, nineteenth
century. (private collection/The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images)
14. Angoulême. (Courtesy Emma Rothschild)
15. The Eastern Telegraph Co.’s network, 1894. (Copyright © The Porthcurno
Collections Trust, by kind permission of the Telegraph Museum, Porthcurno)
16. ‘The Anti-Chinese Wall’ by Friedrich Gratz, from Puck (1882)
17. Europe in 1914: a German satirical map. (bpk-Bildagentur/Art Resource,
NY)
18. First edition of John Buchan’s Greenmantle.
19. Stalin as helmsman. (Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images)
20. Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, Leningrad, November 1945, by Leopold
Plotek. (Berlin and Akhmatova, Leningrad ’45 (2005) (oil on canvas), 77 cm
x 65 cm, copyright © Leopold Plotek)
21. Page from First Military Conscription and What it Means to You!
22. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, 1991. (George Lange/Contour by Getty Images)
23. Stan Druckenmiller and George Soros, 1992. (Peter Morgan/ REUTERS)
24. The 9/11 plotter’s network. (From Valdis E. Krebs, ‘Mapping Networks of
Terrorist Cells’, Connections, 24, 3 (2002), 43–52. Copyright © 2002 by
INSNA. Reprinted by permission)
25. graph of the global export ‘product space’. (From the Center for International
Development at Harvard University. Reprinted by permission)
26. ‘Trumpworld’. (From Michael Hunger, ‘Analyzing the BuzzFeed
TrumpWorld Dataset with Neo4j’ (19 January 2017))
27. Facebook headquarters. (Jeff Hall Photography)
28. Trump Tower. ErikN/123RF, LLC
List of Illustrations
1. ‘The Conspiracy to Rule the World’. (Source:
http://illuminutti.com/2012/04/16/finally-mapped-conspiracy-to-rule-the-
world/)
2. A partial food web for the ‘Scotian Shelf’ in the north-west Atlantic. (From
D. M. Lavigne, ‘Ecological Interactions between Marine Mammals,
Commercial Fisheries, and Their Prey: Unravelling the Tangled Web’, in
Studies of High-Latitude Seabirds, 4: Trophic Relationships and Energetics
of Endotherms in Cold Ocean Systems, ed. W. A. Montevecchi, Occasional
Paper 91, 59–71 (Canadian Wildlife Service, Ottawa, Canada, 1996).
Reprinted by permission of Dr David M. Lavigne)
3. Google n-gram of the frequency of appearance of the words ‘network’ and
‘hierarchy’ in English-language publications between 1800 and 2000.
(Reprinted by permission of The Google Ngram Viewer Team, part of
Google Research, http://books.google.com/ngrams)
4. Euler’s figure 1 from his Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinentis
(1741).
5. Simplified graph of Euler’s Königsberg bridge problem.
6. The foundational concepts of network theory.
7. A simple (but tragic) network: Shakespeare’s Hamlet. (From Franco Moretti,
‘Network Theory, Plot Analysis’, Literary Lab, Pamphlet 2, 1 May 2011)
8. Varieties of network. (From Ricard V. Solé and Sergi Valverde, ‘Information
Theory of Complex Networks: On Evolution and Architectural Constraints’,
Lecture Notes in Physics, 650 (2004), 192. Reprinted with the permission of
Springer)
9. Hierarchy: a special kind of network.
10. The Medici network. (From John F. Padgett and C. K. Ansell, ‘Robust
Action and the Rise of the Medici 1400–1434’, American Journal of
Sociology, 98, 6 (1993), Figure 2a. Reprinted by permission of The
University of Chicago Press)
11. A network of ‘conquest’: the intermarriage of conquistadors and elite Aztec
and Inca families. (By Alvy Ray Smith, from Charles C. Mann, 1493: