Positive and negative aspects of meritocracy are evaluated, together with the difficulties of realizing it in practice. The notion and the theory of networks are recalled. White (fully legal, socially useful), gray (legal, but morally doubtful) and black (illegal) networks are distinguished. Various examples of networks are considered: the family, associations (cultural, religious, political, sports etc.), mason lodges (among the grey networks) including a deviant secret lodge as the P2 in Italy (the nature of which is illustrated), criminal clans and mafia-type associations (a synthetic history of the mafia is provided).

Hungary was by far the largest constituent part of the Habsburg Monarchy, and a considerable European state in its own right. The relationship between the Habsburg ruler and Hungary’s assertive, noble-dominated estates was characterized by a traditional duality between “crown” and “country” which limited the monarch’s ability to raise taxes and mobilize resources. Maria Theresia (1740–1780) skillfully managed this system, while her radical son, Joseph II (1780–90) openly challenged it. He introduced a blizzard of reforms in pursuit of an efficient and unified Habsburg state. His uncompromising reform drive provoked resistance, verging on open revolt by the end of his reign. This chapter argues that effective resistance to Josephist absolutism originated in a group of disillusioned Hungarian officeholders and that these cannot simply be dismissed as dyed in the wool conservatives. Under the new ruler, Leopold II (1790–2) a compromise was reached: the traditional duality was restored and the bulk of the Josephist reform programme was jettisoned. Nonetheless, three key reforms were incorporated which helped to unify the Hungarian élite and made the country, and ultimately the Habsburg Monarchy, better able to face the challenge of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Freemasonry was one of the major conduits through which new ideas and political strategies spread during the Age of Revolution, connecting movements in Latin American regions not just with each other but with like-minded people throughout the Atlantic World. Nearly every major figure of the era has been named as a Freemason: emperors, viceroys, state ministers, archbishops, parish priests, royalist soldiers, insurgent generals, local politicians across the spectrum, women, urban workers, slaves and regular folk all could have been – and in many cases were – affiliated with Masonic Lodges or para-Masonic clubs. This chapter highlights the personal friendships and Masonic connections among this generation, bridging nationality, language and geographic space; discusses membership in a Masonic lodge as an open-ended, fluid experience that shifted and changed along with political conditions; and offers a new emphasis on the importance of Freemasonry as a vector for business, trade, and enterprise, including foreign investment, banking and the emergence of various national publishing industries – all of which were dominated by people with transatlantic Masonic connections.

The Haitian Revolution (1789–1804) in Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) and the African Protestant movement in the early United States coincided to produce a collective of protest literature by Black authors against the unequal treatment and inhumane bondage of Black people. Black Atlantic revolutionary literature offers a countervailing narrative to a historiography of the Haitian Revolution based on analysis from contemporary literary works by white writers. This repertoire of Black literature presents the history of expanding political and social freedoms across the Atlantic world. Black writers constructed disparate revolutionary views of freedom. In Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines pursued different policies, and Julien Raimond advocated predominantly for enfranchisement of gens du couleur, free persons with African and European parentage. African American clergy Lemuel Haynes, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen looked to Christian Republicanism to end slavery, while Freemason leader Prince Hall embraced revolutionary violence as legitimate to secure Black liberation. The geopolitical triumphs of the Haitian Revolution inspired transitions in Black Atlantic literature toward resistance writing throughout the nineteenth century. The revolutionary-era collective established a literary foundation upon which later Haitian and Black American authors published works heralding the birth of an independent Black republic in the Caribbean.

Freemasonry emerged in London in the late 1710s as a form of sociability committed to tolerant, cosmopolitan constitutionalism of a characteristically Enlightenment cast. Welcoming to Jews and Catholics, and men of varying social class, the lodges were also frequented by many, quite probably a majority of, male theatre professionals. Among the famous actors, managers and dramatists, the masons counted George Lillo. My contention is that it is no accident that all the most important contributors to domestic tragedy were masons (Hill, Lillo, Moore) but that their generic innovations crafted a genre peculiarly able to represent the shocks of commercial capital and colonial trade on individuals sutured from traditional forms of familial and kinship network and support. The fraternal assistance of the lodge stood as an alternative source of succour in a hostile world, even if it often failed to rescue its fallen brothers. Lillo wrote The Tragedy of George Barnwell in the same year he joined a lodge, and his drama symbolically enacts the challenges and comforts of masonic fraternity.