Centrality and investment strategies at the beginning of industrialisation in mid-nineteenth-century Catalonia

Abstract

We apply social networks analysis to the study of an important database on investment and companies' share in Catalonia (Spain) of the 19th century. In contrast with most of the existing related literature, usually addressing power relationships across administration boards, we focus on the structure of interactions among individual investors and firms. Centrality analysis uncovers interesting roles played by certain economic sectors (e.g. textile and financial). Furthermore, the diverse composition (in terms of economic activity) of communities in the network (subgroups more densely connected internally than with the rest of the network) reveals a high investment diversification, which nicely agrees with a known characteristic of traditional Catalan business strategies.