Testing Historical theories with SNA: structure and evolution of a credit network

Following some important and recent developments in historical studies of the credit market (Hoffman et al., 2000; Fontaine, 2014), our study focuses on the multiple social relations that organized the financial and commercial activity of an Italian merchant family in pre-modern economy. To investigate the credit network of the Salvadori firm of Trento (Lorandini, 2006) we reconstruct an original dataset from the family business registries of the period between 1720 and to 1760, and cross-analyse the information with multiple archive sources. This allow us to situate the lenders-clients relations inside the local historical and social milieu and to investigate the social dimension of credit with a specific emphasis on mechanisms related to reputation and trust.The results of our analysis illustrates that social mechanisms that contributed to the formation of loans (and their end) were comparatively different in notarized and non-notarized transactions. The comparative structural analysis of the Salvadori credits subnetworks suggest specifically that relations mediated by notaries paved the way for institutionalized economic relations, contributing to structure new types of relations in the Pre-modern societies, and generating ‘integrated trust networks’(Tilly, 2004).