What does the history of global trade look like?:The collaborative database RICardo opens up trade data to shed light on this question

RICardo (Research on International Commerce) is a project dedicated to trade between nations over a period spanning the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the eve of the Second World War. It combines a historical trade database covering all of the world’s countries and a website which invites to an exploration of the history of international trade through data visualizations. The project has recently released a web application and accompanying dataset, which is freely available under the Open Database License. In this blogpost, Beatrice Dedinger (economic historian) and Paul Girard (IT engineer) illustrate its’ use cases and background