Historian and broadcaster Niall Ferguson returns with his latest book which ambitiously sweeps across history examining the interactions between networks and hierarchies. Indeed, Ferguson has set out to redress the balance, maintaining that "social networks have always been much more important in history than most historians, fixated as they have been on hierarchical organisations such as states, have allowed".

Ferguson's research is certainly comprehensive. The book bounces through time stopping long enough to examine diverse topics from the Illuminati to 9/11. Most interesting to me was the analysis on the Reformation - the influence of the printing network is nothing new but Ferguson's proposal that the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment should be considered as "network based revolutions" is interesting to consider.

Like any research aiming for an extensive overview of history, the book meanders in places. On the one hand, there's something to interest every reader here. However, Ferguson's analysis of events in the 20th Century was personally harder for me to engage with. It's within this era that Ferguson's own prejudices come out - comparing the revolution in Russia between 1917-23 to the plague being the most notable example. It's not all bad though and Ferguson's effort to examine networks and hierarchies across the world rather than simply in Europe and America has to be applauded.

The book comes together nicely as Ferguson considers the impact of the internet and the growth of large networks (ie. Facebook, Amazon and Google). He examines recent events such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump continuing to argue the prominence of networks, proposing that Brexit "was a victory for a network... over the hierarchy of the British establishment" and that Trump's network beat the Clinton's hierarchical campaign. Such thoughts will provoke a lot of discussion and although networks have played their role, it seems Ferguson may have fallen into the trap of viewing current events through the lens of his thesis. More notable is the encouragement not to project the aforementioned current events onto early Twentieth Century history. Trump is not Hitler. Populism is not Fascism. Thanks to technological advancements "our own era is profoundly different". This distinction seems to often be ignored - we have our own distinct problems to tackle.

Indeed, Ferguson ends by examining the impact of these advancements and considering our present-day dependence on electronic networks. It's poignant, insightful and, dare I say it, a bit scary. Sometimes it feels as though Ferguson has tried to make information fit into his thesis, but whilst the extent that we are to believe that networks have impacted history may be questioned and analysed, the fact that networks are influencing our day to day life on a tremendous scale is hard to avoid. As Ferguson states: "Unlike in the past, there are now two kinds of people in the world: those who own and run the networks, and those who merely use them" - a reality that we are probably aware of, but one that we choose to ignore.

Subtitled ‘Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power‘, this is described as ‘a whole new way of imagining the world’ as it’s possible that we’re missing information about networks because it’s not recorded in historical archives. But what I found in this book is rather different, being a run through history in what seemed to me a disjointed way, albeit very detailed, with network diagrams and many footnotes. I found parts of it quite tedious, especially the early section detailing the research on the history of networking. If I hadn’t requested the book from NetGalley I would have not bothered reading any more. Fortunately I found some sections were more interesting (such as on such varied topics as social media, the Illuminati, the Reformation, European Royal families, the Cambridge spies, Al Qaeda, ISIS and Trump to name but a few) and I did finish the book.

Ferguson states that his book seeks to learn about the future mainly by studying the past, in particular by looking at the importance of networks in the past that had been at times very powerful. But by the end of the book I didn’t feel too enlightened in that respect as often the distinction between hierarchies and networks is blurred – there are networks that are hierarchical and hierarchies that are parts of wider networks. As Ferguson acknowledges, the dichotomy between hierarchy and network is an over-simplification.

I requested this book when I saw it on NetGalley because history is a subject that I find fascinating, and the blurb interested me. However, although there are sections that I did find interesting, mainly those written as conventional narrative history, overall I was disappointed. I think it is disjointed with sections that don’t seem to me to have much connection with the main theme, overstretching the analogy. To summarise – I don’t think such theoretical historical analysis is for me.

Incredibly rich account. The first quarter of the book is truly captivating. Great summary of the network analysis theory and insightful applications to different pivotal moments across the historical timeline. But then it gets a bit repetitive and overwhelming with misc details (?).

Having said that Niall Ferguson is a powerful non-fiction writer and a man of incredible erudition. So providing you can keep up with Niall as he leapfrogs from one century to the next, from one luminary to another - you are in a great company.

This is my first time reading the author.

This is not the kind of non-fiction I usually read but the blurb drew me in. The book sounded fascinating.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work for me.

Ferguson digests a huge amount of historical material and tries to present it as a struggle between the power of hierarchies and networks. I found some sections interesting bordering on fascinating and other sections left me cold.

Ultimately, I didn’t find every argument presented in the book compelling and believing. Some of the possibilities put forward are intriguing but didn’t completely come together.
The Square And The Tower is a fascinating read.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” state Marx and Engels in ‘The Communist Manifesto’. According to Niall Ferguson’s latest book - ‘The Square and the Tower. Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power’ – the history of all hitherto existing society is rather the history of the tension between networks and hierarchies; a fact hitherto largely ignored by historians because networks characteristically “do not leave an orderly paper trail”, although a subsidiary factor is that the study of networks such as the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Rothschild family and the Bilderberg Group has been widely discredited by the ravings of conspiracy theorists.

According to Ferguson there have been two periods in which networks empowered by new technology, enabling ideas to spread virally, have been massively disruptive of established hierarchical structures, namely, the late fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, powered by the printing press, and from the 1970s to the present day, powered by the personal computer and the internet.

There is obviously much to be said for this point of view. As Ferguson says, “Without Gutenberg, Luther might well have become just another heretic whom the Church burned at the stake, like Jan Hus”, although doesn’t this mean that it would be better to paraphrase Marx and Engels to read that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of new technologies? There’s also the fact that Luther would almost certainly have burnt at the stake had it not been for the protection which he received from the Saxon princes, Frederick the Wise (1483-1525) and his brother John the Constant (1468-1532). Ferguson does not mention this fact, although he does refer to the crucial role of the princes of the Schmalkaldic League (formed in 1531) in consolidating Protestant gains. As German princes can obviously be taken both to embody hierarchy within their realms and to constitute a network when they form a league, this suggests another problem with Ferguson’s thesis, namely, that whereas towers and squares are clearly sharply delineated the concepts they symbolise for Ferguson are often anything but.

This is not to say that ‘The Square and the Tower’ is a bad book. On the contrary, like anything written by Ferguson it is brimming with bright ideas expressed with great flair. Ferguson - like David Cannadine - is living proof that it is possible to write prolifically, persuasively and profoundly for a popular audience. But whilst this book provides many insights and makes one consider the past in a new light I do not think its prism is sufficiently luminous to win many long-term converts.

More polemic than history, Ferguson has certainly digested a huge amount of material and tries to re-cast the entire history of mankind as a constant struggle between the power of hierarchies and networks. This kind of systematic binary categorisation, however, tends to simplify his vision - as his own narrative makes clear, the boundaries between a hierarchy and a network may shift, dissolve and reform: Russian communism, and Hitler's fascism might both have started as political networks but then both turned into the ultimate hierarchies of dictatorships and centralised power.

Despite this acknowledged outcome, Ferguson's own well-publicised politics lead him to the conclusion that 'the lesson of history is that trusting in networks to run the world is a recipe for anarchy' - and the key here is that 'to run the world', because this is what Ferguson is really concerned with. That his own narrative acknowledges the hierarchies of totalitarianism ('the secret of totalitarian success was, in other words, to delegitimise, paralyse or kill outright nearly all social networks outside the hierarchical institutions of party and state') and then *still* conclude that hierarchy, authoritarianism and centralised control is better than the 'anarchy' of distributed networks is a paradox at the heart of the book and something that I found disturbing.

The early part of the book which summarises decades worth of research on network theory feels overlong and could have been sharpened considerably. The later sweep through all of human history has its predictabilities given the author especially in relation to colonial imperialism ('but is "conquest" the correct term to describe what followed?'). The latter sections on contemporary politics (the rise of radical Islam, the Trump election, the Brexit referendum) are, in some ways, the most impassioned but, at the same time, sometimes lose their connection to the overarching argument about networks vs. hierarchies.

Ferguson is not the most elegant of writers here and his binary vision of power structures across human history is perhaps less radical than the book tries to claim (after all, network analysis has been around for the last 50 or so years) - all the same, this is provocative polemic that will undoubtedly prompt public discussion and debate - surely the very attributes of the networks which he, ultimately, disses.