The Square and the Tower Audiobook By Niall Ferguson cover art

The Square and the Tower

Networks, Hierarchies and the Struggle for Global Power

Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

The Square and the Tower

By: Niall Ferguson
Narrated by: John Sackville
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $17.43

Buy for $17.43

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel

About this listen

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson.

What if everything we thought we knew about history was wrong? From the global best-selling author of Empire, The Ascent of Money and Civilization, this is a whole new way of looking at the world.

Most history is hierarchical: it's about popes, presidents, and 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 21st century has been hailed as the Networked Age. But in The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson argues that social networks are nothing new. From the printers and preachers who made the Reformation to the freemasons who led the American Revolution, it was the networkers who disrupted the old order of popes and kings. Far from being novel, our era is the Second Networked Age, with the computer in the role of the printing press. Those looking forward to a utopia of interconnected 'netizens' may therefore be disappointed. For networks are prone to clustering, contagions and even outages. And the conflicts of the past already have unnerving parallels today, in the time of Facebook, Islamic State and Trumpworld.

©2017 Niall Ferguson (P)2017 Penguin Audio
Economic History Economics World Socialism Imperialism Pope China Capitalism Iran Middle East Latin America Africa Self-Determination Middle Ages Russia Soviet Union War Taxation Social justice Imperial Japan Royalty Liberalism
adbl_web_global_use_to_activate_webcro805_stickypopup
All stars
Most relevant  
The content is as you would expect from Ferguson awesome. Anyhow the often mispronounced words make me wonder if the narrator really did his research? For example he calls Ben Bernanke „Ben Bernank“. Very distracting from the content. Pity.

Awesome interesting book, but the narrator pronounced so many things wrong!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

This book was horrible! it was nothing more than an aimless meandering through trivia that I believe was meant to be case studies but precisely what they revealed about the author's thesis was never clear. The book was also ruined by the author's TDS, complete with Russia Russia Russia and social media being presented as both good and bad. The peak TDS was how Clinton breaking the law with her private server hurting her in the election was somehow malice on Trump's part.

Not the author's best work

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Historically biased and very politically incorrect; Ferguson doesn’t miss many chances to express his views as historical facts. Disappointing and pseudo intellectual

Manipulative narrative

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.