Webs of Money: Social Network Analysis and Financial History

This chapter examines the growing contribution, in the last decade, of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to financial history, tracing its evolution from a metaphorical-oriented approach vocabulary to a rigorous analytical framework for modelling the architecture and dynamics of past financial systems. We argue that the alignment between SNA’s relational ontology and the structure of financial phenomena, credit, monetary circulation, capital flows, explains its exceptional heuristic power. After outlining the main methodological challenges of historical network analysis, including causal ambiguity, the meaning of ties, temporal complexity, and data quality, we survey some of the most recent and innovative applications across medieval, early modern, and modern financial contexts. These studies demonstrate how SNA contributes to reshape some core domains of financial history. At the micro level, network analysis uncovers the architecture of preindustrial credit, the brokerage roles of intermediaries such as notaries and moneychangers, and the relational dynamics underpinning trust and liquidity. At the meso level, it clarifies the circulation of money and financial instruments as processes embedded in relational infrastructures and asymmetric corridors of value. At the macro and temporal levels, dynamic and multilayer models illuminate how financial networks evolve over time, showing how resilience, fragility, and institutional change emerge from shifting relational configurations. The chapter highlights how integrating dynamic and multiplex perspectives enables historians to capture feedback loops between political shocks, institutional reforms, and evolving relational structures. We also identify two promising directions for future research: the integration of digital humanities tools, such as text mining, entity recognition, and record linkage, with archival hermeneutics, and a deeper theoretical dialogue between historical SNA, institutional and behavioural economics, and complexity science. These developments position SNA as a ripe, reflexive, and interpretive instrument capable of revealing not only how financial networks were built but how they functioned, adapted, and shaped economic life across time.