Understanding the processes that give rise to networks gives us a better grasp of why we see the networks we do, where we might expect to find them, and how we might expect them to change over time. One way to achieve this is to create simulated networks. Simulated networks allow us to build networks based on detailed principles. We can then ask how networks derived from these principles behave and, correspondingly, understand how our observed networks may be generated by similar principles. This chapter explores many generative algorithms, including random graphs, small world networks, preferential attachment and acquisition, fitness networks, configuration models, amongst many others.

Some people appear to learn more slowly. Could they just be learning different things? Suppose two groups of children are learning words – they have growing vocabularies – but one group acquires the list more slowly than the other. Can we use the structure of the information they learn to gain insight into whether or not they are learning different information? Small worlds are one way of measuring the structure of a community. When quantitatively defined, small worlds have a number of useful properties, including that they compare the structure of a network relative to different versions of itself, thereby providing a kind of ‘control’ network against which to benchmark a measurement. In this chapter, I discuss small worlds and several ways to evaluate them, and then use them to answer a simple question: Are children who learn to talk late just slow versions of early talkers? Or are they learning something different about the world? Along the way, I will enumerate three different approaches to explaining where structure comes from: function, formation, and emulation.

Conflict and Social Control in Late Antiquity examines how the cultivation and application of violence across a range of ‘small worlds’ contributed to the making of society in the late Roman period. From households and families to schoolrooms and monasteries, chapters address the different roles that violence played in maintaining and reinforcing the social order, even during a period of intense religious and political change. Elites adopted a range of approaches – formal and informal, legal and illegal, private and public – to keep subordinates in their place. Especially important were the efforts of social elites to inculcate in their followers the idea that the social order was natural rather than contingent, and therefore should not be challenged but rather perpetuated. Chapters focus on written sources from the fourth and fifth centuries, mainly on Christian authors. Collectively, they show that rather than seeking to transform the fortunes of those who were most vulnerable in society (slaves, women, children), such writers drew creatively on pre-existing discursive traditions, in the process reproducing and (occasionally) attempting to mitigate the plight of the downtrodden.