The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson review – a new understanding of global history?

Don’t leave networks to conspiracy theorists, argues the prolific historian in a book that ranges from the Illuminati to Brexit and Trump

In a dark joke from the early 1930s, a Jewish man is gleefully browsing Der Stürmer, a Nazi propaganda rag. His baffled friends protest: “Why are you looking at that rubbish? And how come you’re enjoying it so much?” “Because,” he answers, “if you read the Jewish papers, it is going terribly for us. But in this one, the news is all good. We control the banks, we control the country – we run the whole world!”

If the maddest conspiracy theories were true, it would be good news for historians, too. They would have rather an easy job, because wars, revolutions and economic crashes could be explained simply by exposing the cabals that engineered them. Niall Ferguson, the prolific historian and broadcaster, is no conspiracy theorist. But in his ambitious new book, The Square and the Tower, he claims that historians have paid too little attention to networks of all kinds. He wants to find a “middle way” between mainstream historians, who have, he thinks, underestimated the role of informal associations, and the conspiracy theorists who exaggerate the significance of such networks.

It would be odd to seek a halfway house between your professional colleagues and a bunch of paranoid obsessives; fortunately, this is not what Ferguson actually delivers. His book “tells the story of the interaction between networks and hierarchies” from ancient times to the present, and argues that in two recent periods, networks have been especially important. The first was from the late 15th century, after the invention of printing, to the end of the 18th century. The second came in the wake of the information-technology revolution of the 1970s and continues to the present day. During the intervening years, from the late 1790s to the late 1960s, he reckons that hierarchical, centralised institutions reasserted their hold: he regards totalitarian regimes in Europe in the first half of the 20th century as prime examples of this.

Ferguson construes the notion of a network broadly. The Bavarian “Illuminati”, a secretive group that lasted just a decade and never had more than around 2,000 members, counts as a network. So does Facebook, which has over a quarter of the human race as members, many of whom seem not nearly secretive enough. Between these extremes come the Jesuits, the Iberian conquistadors, European royalty in the 19th century, British abolitionists, al-Qaida, the Chinese Communist party and many more, all of whom are or were networks, in Ferguson’s expansive usage.

Such social groupings can, to some extent, be analysed with the tools of network science, which is used to study communications technologies, ecosystems and all manner of connected things. Ferguson provides a primer on the subject, though readers will have to refer to a few of his footnotes to get much meat. The science originated with some mathematical diagrams drawn by Leonhard Euler in the 18th century, to solve a puzzle about journeys and bridges. From the early 20th century onwards, similar graphs, known as “sociograms”, were used to map social relationships. Ferguson’s book sports sociograms of (among others) the characters in Hamlet, the Medicis of Florence and their friends, the trade network of the British East India Company, Voltaire and his correspondents, the inevitable Bloomsbury group and jihadi sites on Twitter. These can be intriguing to browse, though it is not always clear why they are there.

Ferguson perhaps overstates the novelty of the network approach to the past. An academic journal article in 2002 noted that influential work using network science to illuminate history had been published throughout the previous decade. And the role of informal social networks has for a long time been a mainstay of historians of the Enlightenment – D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris, a renowned study by Alan Kors, was published four decades ago.

Most of the tale that Ferguson has to tell, though, is recounted as conventional narrative history rather than applied network theory, and is none the worse for that. The canvas is vast and there are stories for all tastes. A few are perhaps too staccato in the telling – eight of the 60 chapters are three pages or fewer – but there are strong extended treatments of several of the subjects of Ferguson’s previous books, including Henry Kissinger (a “networker of genius”), Britain’s colonial past and the doings of the Rothschild family.

George Soros, the philanthropist and financier, appears under two headings. First, as a staple of the most extreme conspiracists’ diet: he supposedly acts in concert with the fictional present-day incarnation of the 18th-century Illuminati, as well as with real clubs, such as the Bilderberg group. Second, at greater length, Soros is featured for his exploits in the currency markets in September 1992, when his hedge funds helped to bring about a devaluation of sterling, and he walked away with a fortune. It was “the collective efforts of Soros’s network” that broke the pound, Ferguson writes, by which he means that the feat could not have been pulled off if other investors had not followed Soros’s lead.

Some of the book’s material will be familiar to readers of recent British history, such as a lively account of Cambridge’s Conversazione Society (or “Apostles”) and the university’s Soviet spies. Less familiar, perhaps, are the machinations of Alfred Milner, a British colonial administrator and politician, who became high commissioner of South Africa in 1897 and the subject of conspiracy theories that were partly well-founded. Another welcome vignette concerns General Sir Walter Walker, a pioneer of counter-insurgency, whose hostility to homosexuals and immigrants, and suspicions about the British prime minister, led him to “end up as fodder for the writers of sitcoms” in the 1970s. For Ferguson, Walker’s military triumphs in the jungles of Borneo and Malaya were examples of the success of “decentralised decision-making” and “networked warfare”.

At the start of his book, Ferguson concedes that his all-encompassing dichotomy between hierarchies and networks is an “over-simplification”, but he contends that it is a useful starting point. There is room for debate about that. Since he regards the Reformation, the birth of modern science and indeed the whole Enlightenment as “network-based revolutions”, one has to wonder if the notion of a network is being overstretched.

The result of the Brexit referendum “was a victory for a network – and network science – over the hierarchy of the British establishment”. And “networks were the key to what happened in American politics in 2016”. Ferguson asserts that Trump’s “network … beat Clinton’s hierarchically organised … campaign”, but it could just as well be said that Clinton’s network was beaten by Trump’s network. Ferguson plausibly claims that Trump could not have become president “without harnessing social networks through online platforms”, but it is also true that he rose to prominence in the first place on old-fashioned television.

Whether or not the concept of networks in general can illuminate history quite as much as Ferguson thinks, he does a depressingly good job of evoking the dangers posed by our reliance on electronic networks. We are increasingly at risk of being coarsened, polarised and hacked, according to this Cassandra. The original Cassandra was not believed. But this time the juggernaut is audibly rolling towards us, and we know Ferguson is right. We just don’t know what to do about it.

• Anthony Gottlieb’s latest book is The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy. The Square and the Tower is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £18.27 (RRP £25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

Anthony Gottlieb

The GuardianTramp

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