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

Niall Ferguson

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THE SQUARE AND THE TOWER

Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power

PART I
Introduction: Networks and Hierarchies

PART II
Emperors and Explorers

PART III
Letters and Lodges

PART IV
The Restoration of Hierarchy

PART V
Knights of the Round Table

PART VI
Plagues and Pipers

PART VII
Own the Jungle

PART VIII
The Library of Babel

PART IX
Conclusion: Facing Cyberia

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

. The Last Judgment (mosaic), Italian School, eleventh century), Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello, Venice. (Mondadori Portfolio/Archivio Magliani/Mauro Magliani & Barbara Piovan/Bridgeman Images)

. A Jacob Moreno sociogram.

. The network of the friendships in a high school, from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent to Adult Health.

. The United States federal government as a hierarchy, 1862.

. The United States federal government as a hierarchy, c. 2010. (Reproduced by permission of NetAge, Inc.)

. The Piazza del Campo in Siena. (Martin Thomas Photography/Alamy Stock Photo)

. The Cantino planisphere (1502).

. The St Bartholomews Day massacre of Huguenots (Protestants), Paris, 1572.

. Gerard ter Borch, Ratification of the Treaty of Mnster, May 15, 1648.

. 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), 55862, copyright 2014 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, reprinted by permission of the American Association for the Advancement of Science)

copyright 2011 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press)

. George Washington as a Freemason (lithograph), American school, nineteenth century. (private collection/Bridgeman Images)

. Le Gateau des Rois (hand-coloured engraving), French school, nineteenth century. (private collection/The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images)

. Angoulme. (Courtesy Emma Rothschild)

. The Eastern Telegraph Co.s network, 1894. (Copyright The Porthcurno Collections Trust, by kind permission of the Telegraph Museum, Porthcurno)

. The Anti-Chinese Wall by Friedrich Gratz, from Puck (1882)

. Europe in 1914: a German satirical map. (bpk-Bildagentur/Art Resource, NY)

. First edition of John Buchans Greenmantle.

. Stalin as helmsman. (Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images)

. 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)

. Page from First Military Conscription and What it Means to You!

. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, 1991. (George Lange/Contour by Getty Images)

. Stan Druckenmiller and George Soros, 1992. (Peter Morgan/ REUTERS)

. The 9/11 plotters network. (From Valdis E. Krebs, Mapping Networks of Terrorist Cells, Connections, 24, 3 (2002), 4352. Copyright 2002 by INSNA. Reprinted by permission)

. graph of the global export product space. (From the Center for International Development at Harvard University. Reprinted by permission)

. Trumpworld. (From Michael Hunger, Analyzing the BuzzFeed TrumpWorld Dataset with Neo4j (19 January 2017))

. Facebook headquarters. (Jeff Hall Photography)

. Trump Tower. ErikN/123RF, LLC

)

. 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, 5971 (Canadian Wildlife Service, Ottawa, Canada, 1996). Reprinted by permission of Dr David M. Lavigne)

)

. Eulers figure 1 from his Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinentis (1741).

. Simplified graph of Eulers Knigsberg bridge problem.

. The foundational concepts of network theory.

. A simple (but tragic) network: Shakespeares Hamlet. (From Franco Moretti, Network Theory, Plot Analysis, Literary Lab, Pamphlet 2, 1 May 2011)

. Varieties of network. (From Ricard V. Sol 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)

. Hierarchy: a special kind of network.

F. Padgett and C. K. Ansell, Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici 14001434, American Journal of Sociology, 98, 6 (1993), Figure 2a. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press)

. A network of conquest: the intermarriage of conquistadors and elite Aztec and Inca families. (By Alvy Ray Smith, from Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Knopf, 2011. Reprinted by permission)

. The English Protestant network immediately before and after John Bradfords execution. (From Ruth Ahnert and Sebastian E. Ahnert, Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I: A Quantitative Approach, ELH, 82, 1 (Spring 2015), 27, Figures 7 and 8. Copyright 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press)

. The trade network of the British East India Company, 16201824. (From Emily Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade: The English East India Company, 16001757 (Princeton University Press, 2014), 114. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press)

. Reprinted by permission of Republic of Letters)

. Parody on Raphaels School of Athens, by James Scott, after Sir Joshua Reynolds (1751).

. The revolutionary network in Boston, c. 1775. (From Shin-Kap Han, The Other Ride of Paul Revere, Mobilization, 14, 2 (2009))

. The House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.

. James Watt, Matthew Boulton and the social network of steam engine technology, c. 17001800. (From Francis C. Moon, Social Networks in the History of Innovation and Invention (Springer, 2014), KL 4924. Reprinted by permission of Springer)

. Nineteenth-century networks of scientific practice. (From P. J. Taylor, M. Hoyler and D. M. Evans, A Geohistorical Study of the Rise of Modern Science: Mapping Scientific Practice through Urban Networks, 1500-1900, Minerva 46, no. 4 (2008), 391410. Reprinted by permission of Springer)

The English Octopus: It Feeds on Nothing but Gold! Anti-Rothschild cartoon, 1894. (From W. H. Harvey, Coins Financial School (1894).)

. The myth of Lord Milners network.

. The Bloomsbury Group c. 1925. (From Peter Dolton, Identifying Social Network Effects, Economic Record 93, Supplement S1 (June 2017), Figure 2. Reprinted by permission of the Economic Society of Australia)

. Evolution of the major relationship changes between the protagonists of the First World War, 18721907. (From Tibor Antal, Paul Krapivsky and Sidney Redner, Social Balance on Networks: The Dynamics of Friendship and Enmity,