The Napoleonic notion of one man in total control keeps on repeating itself right the way down to the middle of the 20th century. By the 1970s the great hierarchical states that had emerged in the mid 20th century were beginning to fragment so this is the scene into which Henry Kissinger enters Nixon administration. That brings us in little while to the subject of China which shows very interesting characteristics of both the hierarchy and the network.
Niall Ferguson is the preeminent historian of the ideas that define our time. He has challenged how we think about money, power, civilisation and empires. Now he wants to reimagine history itself. Networks, he explains, are the key to history. The greatest innovators have been ‘superhubs’ of connections. The most powerful states, empires and companies have been those with the most densely networked structures. And the most transformative ideas – from the printing presses that launched the Reformation to the Freemasonry that inspired the American Revolution – have gone viral precisely because of the networks within which they spread. Our host for this conversation is historian, author and broadcaster, Rana Mitter. The audio of this live Intelligence Squared event was recorded in London in 2017.
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