A Very Short History of Networks

The language we use for networks comes mostly from web and information technology. The internet was one of the first places we could actually see networks operate at scale, and see their patterns materialize. For example, before the internet, you might have known you had friends, and your friends had friends, but the full extent of how people connected remained mostly hidden. You couldn't see the whole shape of it. The internet made it visible. You could suddenly see who knew who, trace paths between distant people through mutual connections, and watch how information moved from one cluster to another. However, networks are far older and far more differentiated than the internet.

Trade routes are archetypal networks; the Silk Road, Mediterranean shipping networks, trans-Saharan trade routes were all networks of merchants, caravansaries, port cities, translators, money changers. Goods and ideas, religions, technologies, diseases all flowed across these networks.

Similarly religious networks account for huge amounts of in and outflows. Monasteries in medieval Europe were networked, sharing texts, practices, and visitors. Pilgrimage routes connected distant places and carried information between them. The hajj was like an annual network pulse. Buddhist monasteries across Asia maintained connections for millennia, spreading between them parts of the dharma and sacred texts, sharing and sharpening stories that became Jātaka tales. Interestingly all religions both used and extended existing network infrastructure like the Silk Road to spread and grow.

Another example is guilds and craft networks - the knowledge of skilled workers flowed across cities and countries; a metalworker in Florence knew techniques that came from Damascus through a chain of apprentices and masters. Knowledge, techniques, tool blueprints traveled through these networks over generations.