ABSTRACT
Early work on scientific networks focused on the emergence of what Latour famously called “centers of calculation” and “centers of accumulation.” The contributions to Empires of Knowledge represent well the value of qualitative, quantitative, and digital approaches to the historical study of networks, without prioritizing any single methodology, in some instances, combining more than one to good effect. Projects such as “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon” have used the insights and methodologies emerging from the work to reconstruct the community that formed in relation to the author of the New Atlantis, making the redoubtable Lord Chancellor a node in a network. During the fifteenth century the cultural, multi-faith networks of the Mediterranean that had been in development since antiquity were reoriented as the Ottoman Empire increasingly played a role that would eventually surpass the presence of the Italian trading nations. Historians of the early modern world have rediscovered the value of understanding merchant networks.
