The famous poet John Donne (1572-1631) wrote: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” We are social animals and we naturally form social networks to interact with each other. But even as we talk constantly about them nowadays, we have only a very limited knowledge of where networks come from and how they work in practice. More importantly, we tend to underestimate the significance of networks in the past (Ferguson 2018).

In pre-industrial Europe, networks were at the centre of social, and above all, economic life (Dermineur 2021; Lemercier 2005; Fontaine 2014; Muldrew 1998). This is especially true for early financial markets. Before the mid-nineteenth century and the proliferation of banks, most financial transactions took place through peer-to-peer exchanges. Nearly 90% of the transactions in early modern England were carried out on credit because a chronic shortage of money as a medium of exchange made credit crucial in daily transactions (Muldrew, 1998). In France, before banks, the volume of mortgage debt equalled 10% of GDP in 1807 (Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal 2019). No doubt, viable financial markets and networks existed long before the emergence of modern banking institutions in the mid-nineteenth century. These financial exchanges were sustained through strong norms of collaboration, fairness, and solidarity; traditional features of moral economies (Fontaine 2014).

The aim of this workshop is threefold. First, the discussions will focus on the nature and characteristics of financial networks with particular attention to network formation and sustainability. Secondly, the workshop aims to explore the possibilities offered by social network analysis (henceforth SNA) for the study of past financial markets. In particular, the tools to visualize the patterning of relationships between actors will be discussed. And the network concepts such as homophily, structural holes, or centrality calculations drawing attention to the particularities of communities will also be a major focus of this workshop. Thirdly, the discussions will also pay particular attention to the economic strategies and behaviour of men and women in early financial networks.

The general aim is to understand how early financial networks formed and worked, and how people behaved in such networks. This workshop focuses on several critical research areas:

1. How did early financial networks form?

2. What were the strategies and behaviour of men and women in early financial markets and networks?

3. How did social networks affect economic behaviour?

This workshop proposes to break new ground in adopting a comparative approach via research on various regions and time periods. Invited guests will present their research in this two-day workshop.

Credit and debt have been at the heart of scholarly attention for some time now. Political historians have long underlined the vital role of public debt in the state-building process and in sustaining the early modern military state (Stasavage 2011) High finance and its relation to trade have also attracted considerable attention (Cassis 2010; Wennerlind 2011). And Niall Ferguson, among others, has made a close examination of banking systems (Ferguson 2018). Exploration into the alternatives to formal banking practices, however, is still very new. So far, only a few regional case studies have highlighted the characteristics and complexity of informal credit networks (Lindgren 2017; Dermineur 2019; Pompermaier 2021). We lack not only data on this, but also a comparative approach to fully understand the features and mechanisms of informal financial markets and agents’ interactions in these networks.

Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that “Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this – no dog exchanges bones with another”(Smith 2009). And yet, the emphasis on economic behaviour and network interaction has not received sufficient attention, especially regarding the pre-industrial period. Nobel prize recipient Richard Thaler and other behavioural economists have focused their attention principally on contemporary economic behaviour and strategies (Thaler 1994; Simon 1983). Similarly, cultural historians working on the history of emotions have ignored economic behaviour so far. And no historian has seriously tackled the issue of large networks in the past, let alone early financial networks (Ferguson 2018; Davison 2019). There are studies on small economic networks such as the networks of entrepreneurs or trade networks, but they do not use SNA and do not handle large datasets (Lindgren 2002). Our workshop aims to address this gap. It will not only provide new insights but also new data for the comprehension of past financial networks before the advent of banks.

In order to fill this historiographical gap and fully understand economic behaviour and network interaction, this workshop focuses a great deal on Social Network Analysis (M. O. Jackson 2010; M. O. Jackson 2014; Scott 2013). SNA is the most suitable method with which to uncover the complexities of human systems. Yet, the overwhelming majority of historical studies relating to networks do so without explicitly referring to the SNA methodology. Thanks to technological advances and innovation in digital tools, sociologists and economists have now used SNA for a few years (Padgett and Ansell 1993; Padgett and McLean 2011; M. Granovetter 1985; Granovetter 1983).