'The Square and the Tower' considers the staggering power of networks
Hierarchical structures – empires, kingdoms, companies – tend to dominate the study of history, for understandable reasons: they're concentrated, dramatic, and comparatively easy to research. They make coins, build roads and prisons, and keep boxes and boxes of receipts. As historian Niall Ferguson points out in his remarkably interesting new book , this concentrated visibility of hierarchies makes them much easier to research and analyze than the more scattered that are the other major shape power takes in human affairs.
