The Square And The Tower: Networks, Hierarchies And The Struggle For
Global Power

Product Description

The New York Times bestseller' Silicon Valley needed a history lesson & Ferguson has provided it' Eric Schmidt What if everything we thought we knew about history was wrong? From Niall Ferguson the global bestselling author of Empire The Ascent of Money & Civilization this is a whole new way of imagining the world Most history is hierarchical it's about popes presidents & 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 & the Tower Niall Ferguson argues that social networks are nothing new From the printers & preachers who made the Reformation to the freemasons who led the American Revolution it was the networkers who disrupted the old order of popes & kings Far from being novel our era is the Second Networked Age with the computer in the role of the printing press Once we understand this both the past & the future start to look very different indeed' Ambitious & illuminating the historian who more than most connects our age to its past' Evening Standard Books of the Year' Captivating & compelling' The New York Times' Niall Ferguson has again written a brilliant book In 400 pages you will have restocked your mind Do it' Wall Street Journal