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Economic historians have used GDP and its backwards projections to quantify economic growth and the process of early globalisation from year 1 CE to the present day. This has generated a lively debate concerning which methodologies are the most accurate for quantitative history and which data are most reliable. In addition, whilst an overwhelming amount of scholarship has emerged on the supply side, the demand side and family economic changes have been less popular in economic history. In this article, I present a concrete case study to analyse consumer behaviour: the circulation of Chinese goods in western Mediterranean markets during the eighteenth century. In so doing, I test the "trickle-down" theory with new archival data using GECEM Project Database, and apply the OLS and SNA to measure the social distribution of these goods through trade networks' intermediation. The main result is that the agency of middle social groups—mainly merchants—was changing consumers' behaviour in western Mediterranean markets, and not local oligarchies and nobility as the "trickle-down" theory has conventionally assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The GECEM Project Database stands out as a new Digital Humanities solution to accurately order and analyse the new historical Big Data gathered in Chinese and European historical archives. Traditional challenges such as capture, storage, analysis, data curation, searching, sharing, transfer, visualization, querying, updating, and information privacy are being tackled and solved within the design of this new multi-relational database. The implementation of this database has as its main innovative elements the capability of coding and cross-referring historical data in Chinese and Western languages. Thus, we present a new database as a digital solution to solve the long-lasting problem in historical research: the maximization and optimization of data collection when analysing historical sources and how to make use of a large amount of registers and information when developing case studies and work hypotheses for historical research. In this paper, we present a solution for data collection and analysis of probate inventories and trade records which is a relevant source when determining changes in patterns of consumption and global trade through the introduction of Chinese goods into Europe and vice versa during the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to China's ongoing economic rise, recent studies in global (economic) history have moved away from the traditional Eurocentric view to a Sinocentric one. There is extensive literature focused on the introduction of Chinese goods to Europe, as well as on China's economic development within the framework of the great divergence debate. However, less research has centred on the introduction of European goods to Chinese markets, specifically the markets in Guangdong or other coastal regions (such as Fujian, Zhejiang and Jiangsu), before the First Opium War. This paper aims to side-step the Sinocentric approach, eschewing the current wave of national history in China, by analysing the international trade in Qing China from the Kangxi era until the Qianlong period. It provides new empirical evidence from the First Historical Archives of China (FHAC) by examining the impact on global trade of China's imperial edicts and interventionist policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the application of new technologies, software coding and computer analysis in the social sciences and humanities, mainly in the field of economic history. In the last two decades, the use of new computer technologies among historians to develop theories and solve questions has fostered a vibrant historiographical debate. However, these new digital tools have largely been used as an end in themselves, rather than as a means to develop hypotheses and answer questions. This has prevented researchers from fully exploiting such technologies in their field. In this article, I discuss how I designed a new multi-relational database using the "Access" package and SQL language to test the "industrious revolution" hypothesis and present the "vicarious consumption" theory as an alternative model for analyzing the eighteenth-century circulation of Chinese goods in the Western Mediterranean region. It presents the cross-referencing method I used to analyze the historical information I collected, mainly from probate inventories and trade records. This method makes it possible to navigate through the data in a way that goes beyond the traditional use of "excel" tables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]