This rationale of Greek state formation incorporates extra-territorial
activities and acquisitions, but nevertheless focuses on the internal
mechanisms of organizational development. Another aspect of the
same process, namely the role played by social networks, has recently
been explored in a series of conferences, some of which are now pub-
lished.^27 Network theory is a tool with a great deal of potential for
examining historical social interactions. As a method derived from
physical and mathematical applications, it can provide greater clarity
in understanding the effectiveness of a network in transmitting ideas,
people, and goods. Networks do not generate exchange automatically,
but rather undergo phase changes, when the relationships between
individual links lead to the emergence of nodes and clusters of nodes.
Events within networks can then generate more specific patterns. Experi-
mental data shows that social networks do not correlate directly with
other physical networks, since they display some memory-induced
modifications. Whereas, in the physical world, networks often display
power law distributions, with large numbers of poorly connected nodes
and a few very well-connected‘hubs’, networks in human societies are
reinforced by memory and social institutions, which provide additional
stability and continuity.^28 The network analogy is implicit in the narra-
tive of Greek‘colonial’expansion in thefirst half of thefirst millennium
bc, and Irad Malkin, perhaps more than any other scholar, has articu-
lated the ways in which Greek overseas ventures reflect the dynamics of a
‘small world’network, in which individuals, separated by varying geo-
graphical distances, may nonetheless be closely linked by virtue of shared
interests or relationships. The potential weakness of this argument lies in
the application of a very specific mechanism, designed to demonstrate
the connectedness of historical individuals, to a diachronic set of data. In
order to have explanatory value, a ‘small world’network must be
chronologically quite well defined, since the individuals who would
have formed the nodes of the network were linked by personal ties of
trust. Other kinds of networks than the‘small world’variety do not have
to be personal ones; they can be organizational or functional networks.
The current interest in social networks has spawned a great deal of
research that is potentially relevant to the study of ancient societies
too. It is clear, for example, that the psychological attitude of the
(^27) See the contributors toNetworks;Knappett 2011; Malkin 2011; also Dietler 2011;
various contributors toHellEc III.
(^28) Bak 1997, 183–98, 185–7,‘Real economics is like sand’; Watts 2003, 220–84; Ball
2004, 452–66; Collar 2009 provides a discrete exposition of the mechanical implications.
The role of networks in the northern Aegean is developed in Chs 4, and 5.
96 Societies and economies