Imperial Schemes
Empire and the Rise of the British Business-State, 1914-1939
This website, which features network visualizations and data, is intended to accompany and complement my dissertation, Imperial Schemes (Harvard, 2020). One of the principal themes of the dissertation is that the interwar British state was closely connected with private interests. In fact, the dissertation traces the development of the “business-state”, a nexus of private and public entities and the individuals who were connected with them. The network graphs on this site are an attempt to convey the interconnectedness of the “business-state.” They are also meant to highlight the ways in which the dissertation’s chapters fit together and relate to one another.
This is a network visualization produced using the software Gephi. It includes the 300 historical individuals mentioned by name in this dissertation as well as 260 state, business, and non-governmental organizations also mentioned by name in the dissertation. The links, or edges, between these people and entities are, in an overwhelming majority (about 90%) of cases, referenced explicitly in the dissertation. The remaining edges were added for clarity. Nodes are sized according to the number of connections each has. Therefore, in general, the larger the node, the more important it is in the context of the dissertation. Nodes are colored according to the key, above.
This graph is a representation of the argument about the “business-state” made in the text of the dissertation. It is indexical of the dissertation, in that it includes only the individuals and other entities explicitly referenced within the dissertation. Moreover, in the vast majority of cases, the connections (edges) between two nodes are also referenced explicitly in the dissertation. There are 110 or so edges that are not explicitly referenced, but are relevant to the overall social network described by the dissertation. For instance, the Overseas Trade Committee of the Federation of British Industries features prominently in chapter 1. Perry Grosvenor, a merchant, is mentioned in chapter 2, but not in connection with the committee, of which he was nonetheless a member. There is therefore an edge between them.
A large proportion of the edges are between committees or other such bodies and the individuals who comprised them. Another large proportion are between companies or government departments and people who worked for them. Very few are between individuals themselves; the only such connections are the ones mentioned specifically in the text. Details on the nature of the relationship can be found in the “edges” csv file, available for download. More details, of course, can be found in the text of the dissertation itself. It is worth noting, however, that all connections, or edges, are weighted equally. The reason for this is that there is no easy way of determining whether certain employment relationships are more or less “strong” than others, or (for that matter) whether they are stronger or weaker than family relationships (or the relationship between a government department and a division therein). Therefore, in determining the layout of the graph, the plotting algorithm treats every connection between two nodes as “pulling” those nodes together with equal attraction as every other connection.
The datasets themselves, both for the nodes and the edges, can be downloaded at right.
I have created separate graphs for each chapter. These graphs feature in the text of the dissertation itself, but high-quality renders of them can be found here. Each chapter-specific graph features the individuals mentioned explicitly in the given chapter, together with all the connections featuring those people described in the dissertation as a whole.
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| Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 |
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| Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 |
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| Conclusion |