Trading Consequences White Paper

Scholars interested in nineteenth-century global economic history face a voluminous historical record. Conventional approaches to primary source research on the economic and environmental implications of globalised commodity flows typically restrict researchers to specific locations or a small handful of commodities. By taking advantage of cutting-edge computational tools, the project was able to address much larger data sets for historical research, and thereby provides historians with the means to develop new data-driven research questions. In particular, this project has demonstrated that text mining techniques applied to tens of thousands of documents about nineteenth-century commodity trading can yield a novel understanding of how economic forces connected distant places all over the globe and how efforts to generate wealth from natural resources impacted on local environments