Understanding network formation is essential to building a cohesive theory of network connectivity in the social relations that form historical regimes. Using diagrams of network structure in which nodes represent components and lines represent their interactions, we can recognize essential features of the interactive configurations that lead to patterns (institutions) and behaviors (regimes) and emergent properties. When we capture how agents interact and self-organize, we can infer structure; and knowing structure we can infer patterns of information transmission and thus collective behavior, including why system growth or breakdown follows a critical event. Theoretical network models – random, scale-free, small-world, and hub-and-spoke – capture these regularities and allow us to infer the principles underlying their construction and the trade-offs of stability and resilience. Knowing the patterns of structure and interaction, we gain a deeper grasp of two critically important and strongly correlated phenomena of contemporary political economy: the Great Divergence of East and West, and the global impact of China’s contemporary and unprecedented economic transformation.

The first of the book’s five great transitions is the creation of institutions of dynastic succession in Europe and China. Orderly, incontestable hereditary succession afforded dynastic longevity from the ninth century onward, and was a key institutional determinant of long-term economic performance, serving as a hypernetwork that contributed to system-level dynamics. The hypernetwork structures in Europe and China were very different, one being scale-free, the other star-like. Each presented trade-offs between properties of stability and resilience that arose according to widely different adaptive strategies. Historical meta-regimes offer evidence that qualities embedded in macrostructures are distinct from those at the micro levels, and that long-standing institutions are likely to be gradual in formation, but sudden in their demise. Redundancies in Europe’s network of connected dynasties ruling across the continental “fabric” lent resilience to the macro-system. China's system distributed information more efficiently, but with the attendant risk that the collapse of a lone central hub reliant on a powerful bureaucracy would produce cycles of decay during which the population suffered on massive scales.