Square And The Tower: Networks, Hierarchies And The StruggleFor Global Power The

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The new bestseller that shows why everything we thought we knew about history was wrong

'The most brilliant historian of his generation' The Times

Most history is hierarchical- it's about popes, presidents, and prime ministers. But what if that's simply because they create the historical archives? What if we are missing equally powerful but less visible networks - leaving them to the conspiracy theorists, with their dreams of all-powerful Illuminati?

The twenty-first century has been hailed as the Networked Age. But in The Square and the Tower Niall Ferguson argues that social networks are nothing new. From the printers and preachers who made the Reformation to the freemasons who led the American Revolution, it was the networkers who disrupted the old order of popes and kings. Far from being novel, our era is the Second Networked Age, with the computer in the role of the printing press. But networks have a dark side, prone to clustering, contagions, and even outages. And the conflicts of the past already have unnerving parallels today, in the time of Facebook, Islamic State and Trumpworld.

Book details and technical specifications

Format: Paperback / softback
ISBN13: 9780141984810
Published: June 2018

Number of pages: 608
Width: 129 mm
Height: 198 mm
Depth: 26 mm

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd