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Enterprise and Society Advance Access published online on September 21, 2009
Enterprise and Society, doi:10.1093/es/khp051
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press [on behalf of the Business History Conference]. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Visual Analytics of an Eighteenth-Century Business Network

John Haggerty and Sheryllynne Haggerty

JOHN HAGGERTY is a Lecturer in Information Systems Security at the University of Salford, UK. His research interests include digital forensics, computer security, and networks
SHERYLLYNNE HAGGERTY is Lecturer in Early-Modern History at the University of Nottingham, UK. She has published on the trading communities of the British-Atlantic world

Contact information: Sheryllynne Haggerty, School of History, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK. E-mail: sheryllynne.haggerty@nottingham.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.


   Introduction
 

A social network consists of a finite set or sets of actors and the relation or relations defined upon them. The presence of relational information is a critical and defining feature of a social network.1

Historians have become increasingly interested in networks as an analytical tool for eighteenth-century commerce. In much of the historiography these networks are treated as inherently beneficial for the wider economy and the actors themselves. Recently, however, historians have started to problematize networks and to complicate our understanding of them. Indeed, the quote above stresses that a network is not simply the actors within it, but the relationships between them. Realizing this facilitates an understanding of how such networks function.

The purpose of this paper is to disseminate the results of an interdisciplinary experiment in which social network analysis methodologies are applied to a historical case study. It visualizes the network and then measures the relationships . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   Historians and Networks
 

   Background to the Case Study and Methodology
 

   Analysis of Rainford's Slave Trade Network
 

   Methodological Issues
 
Failure to identify key players in quantitative source analysis
Source-centric data
Reliability of results
Visualization
Measurement of relationships
Predictiveness

   Conclusion
 

   Appendix A: Full Description of the Measures Used
 

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