Applied History Project

Most history is hierarchical: it's about emperors, presidents, prime ministers and field marshals. It's about states, armies and corporations. It's about orders from on high. Even history "from below" is often about trade unions and workers' parties. But what if that's simply because hierarchical institutions create the archives that historians rely on? What if we are missing the informal, less well documented social networks that are the true sources of power and drivers of change?

The 21st century has been hailed as the Age of Networks. However, in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that networks have always been with us, from the structure of the brain to the food chain, from the family tree to freemasonry. Throughout history, hierarchies housed in high towers have claimed to rule, but often real power has resided in the networks in the town square below. For it is networks that tend to innovate. And it is through networks that revolutionary ideas can contagiously spread. Just because conspiracy theorists like to fantasize about such networks doesn't mean they are not real.

From the cults of ancient Rome to the dynasties of the Renaissance, from the founding fathers to Facebook, The Square and the Tower tells the story of the rise, fall and rise of networks, and shows how network theory--concepts such as clustering, degrees of separation, weak ties, contagions and phase transitions--can transform our understanding of both the past and the present.

Just as The Ascent of Money put Wall Street into historical perspective, so The Square and the Tower does the same for Silicon Valley. And it offers a bold prediction about which hierarchies will withstand this latest wave of network disruption--and which will be toppled.

"MI5's dossiers on Stern Gang members released this week cast the early years of the Cold War in a stark new light — terrorism, not the Soviet Union, was the main threat. The newly released files also have an enduring legacy. Many of the security techniques British intelligence developed to deal with the Irgun and Stern Gang — surveillance of extremist groups, border and port checks, liaison with foreign police agencies — were the same counterterrorist procedures later used against the IRA and current Islamist terror groups."

There is no evidence that the KGB achieved anything comparable in Oxford to its agent recruitment at Cambridge. However, this was not through lack of trying on the part of the KGB.

On Nov. 29, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson announced that Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, would leave his post to run the World Bank. “I do not know to this day whether I quit or was fired,” McNamara wrote decades later. “Maybe it was both."

"This story is revealed in remarkable tranche of records declassified on Tuesday by the British Security Service, better known as MI5, about a major Russian spy network that operated in Britain in the post-war years, known as the Portland Spy Ring."

The authors offer a detailed analysis of the factors that led to Alexander Haig's resignation as U.S. Secretary of State in 1982 in order to enrich scholars' and policymakers' understanding of the political and strategic consequences of a chief diplomat being maligned and marginalized.

No two financial crises are the same. The next one will not be like the last one. But there will be a next one and, as the monetary medication begins to be withdrawn, it draws nearer. 

"...[T]he Trump-Russia scandal has the potential to spark an even more damaging US constitutional crisis than Watergate. Unlike Watergate, it involves a hostile foreign power and its intelligence services. At the same time that Mueller's opening indictments were unveiled yesterday, it was revealed that Russian-backed fake election content had reached a staggering 126 million Americans on Facebook during the 2016 election campaign. The Russia-Trump scandal, Watergate 2.0, is just beginning."

Booms and busts in international capital flows and commodity prices, as well as the vagaries of international interest rates, have long been associated with economic crises, especially – but not exclusively – in emerging markets. The “type” of crisis varies by time and place. Sometimes the “sudden stop” in capital inflows sparks a currency crash, sometimes a banking crisis, and quite often a sovereign default. Twin and triple crises are not uncommon.