Historical Network Analysis

Network is a popular term in contemporary historical research papers and articles. It is rare to find a journal without at least one article that to some extent discusses networks which are found in the relations between the subjects being investigated. However, when we take a closer look at these networks, they often turn out to be nothing more than a couple of relations between a certain person and his/her surroundings. Thus the word network is merely used as a metaphor, a trendy term to attract potential readers. With its vagueness and lack of a determined definition, it is regarded as suitable to describe a huge variety of social relations that otherwise are hard to define. Ylva Hasselberg pinpointed this tendency when she observed: ‘If the people that we are working with don't belong to a class or professional group, maybe it is a network!?’ When I started my research project on the web of economic and social ties between Hanse merchants on the Norwegian market about ten years ago, I decided to work with the term network as the overall description for this phenomenon. In the year 2001 this term and approach sounded very reasonable, as network was already established as a concept used in many scientific and intellectual discourses. Social sciences and economics had at that time paved the methodological pathway to investigating networks, and even in the humanities the term was widely used in many contexts.