Visual Analytics of an Eighteenth-Century Business Network

"This paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary experiment. We apply visual analytics to study the business networks of a merchant based in Jamaica with extensive commercial links with Liverpool in the late eighteenth century. Social network analysis techniques, and in particular graph theory, have been applied to the quantitative data to understand the dynamics of the networks identified by the merchant’s accounts ledger. The network, once constructed and visualised, provides tangible evidence of our case study’s level of involvement in the slave trade and slave trade networks between 1779 and 1793. However, social network analysis using graph theory allows us to model the intangible evidence; that is, an examination of the relationships, and therefore dynamics, of this business network. Importantly, this paper identifies the predictive qualities of this research methodology when analysing an historical case study."