The Reformation is very much on our minds in the current year because it's 500 years since Martin Luther basically put pinned up his precepts on a church door opening the great rift in European Catholicism and bringing about what we now think of as the birth of Protestantism. Along with that comes a variety of changes both in messages and technology, writes Neil Richards. He argues there have been two great ages of network disruption empowered by new technology one really starts in 1517 and the other gets going in our own time in the 1970s with the birth and rapid growth of the personal computer.
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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