Doctoral Dissertation Research - Structure and Growth: English Trade in the East Indies, 1601-1835

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Peter S. Bearman, Emily A. EriksonDoctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant Doctoral Dissertation Research: "Structure and Growth: English trade in the East Indies, 1601-1835"21 June 2005Before the industrial revolution, the English East India Company linked the disjoint markets of Asia and Northern Europe and created one structured, densely integrated global trade network. This project uses a remarkable, new dataset to reconstruct the development of the English company's trade network over the lifetime of the firm. The project is designed to answer the questions: (1) how did the EIC successfully create the conditions for organized global trade; (2) what is process by which trade expands; (3) to what extent does the institutional make-up of a location affect its incorporation into the development of an organized trade network. The initial stage of the project involved the electronic transcription of data recording all 4,572 voyages of the EIC and the career histories of the 12,956 men who served as officers aboard the East Indiamen ships - supplemented by the collection of institutional and geographic variables on the 272 ports visited by the EIC and micro-histories of encounters preserved in the surviving ships' logs, stored in the British Library. The span of time covers two centuries of expansion, from 1601 to 1835. Analysis strategies include dynamic social network analysis, spatial analysis, focused case comparisons, and standard statistical techniques. This mixed-method approach allows the application and investigation of theoretical insights from new institutionalism and social networks, designed to sit within the broader fields of economic, historical, and cultural sociology. There is a particular focus on incorporating the history of world trade into the development of modern economic growth and identifying opportunities for economic development at the peripheries of established world-economic systems.