"Visualizing State Capture: Networks and Scale in Historical Argument"

Ian Kumekawa
MIT History
[RSVP]

How can network mapping and visualization help make historical arguments? This talk will explore how networks can be both valuable tools for research and rhetorical tools for making arguments through a case study that concerns the entanglement of business and public interests within the British imperial state.

During and after World War I, British businessmen made major inroads into policymaking circles. In doing so, they forged a nexus of power that aligned global commercial interests with the state’s geopolitical aspirations. In short, business interests came to become state interests. Even in Britain, a textbook liberal democracy, there was no bright line between public and private. Networks help tell this story and others like it by allowing historians to move nimbly between scales, from stories about specific individuals to overarching structural realities.

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Ian Kumekawa focuses on the history of economic thinking, imperial statecraft, and global capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is also interested in the history of bureaucracy and the digital humanities, especially network visualizations.