not.3 Neither Peter Collinson nor any of the other letter writers examined here used the term. In the early modern world it commonly referred to crosshatched pieces of metal or wood, or to loosely woven pieces of clothing. The hero of Richard Head’s novel The English Rogue referred to an acquaintance’s dilapidated cloak as “that Network garment of yours.”4 His friend then asserted, “I wish it were a Net, for then I might employ my self by fishing.”5 These networks were intricate or worn creations that could also be useful. Some works of net caught fish and others ensnared. Arachne’s “cunning network,” an author argued, “still intangles Art (like flies).”6 By the early eighteenth century, though, networks commonly helped British intellectuals describe the systems that pumped life through organisms. It was the “curious and wonderful Network of Veins” within man that transported one physician with admiration.7 These networks of veins brought movement to networks. They were no longer just cunning and useful objects; blood and life now circulated through them. When early modern figures envisioned networks, they saw threads loosely woven together, gossamer spiders’ webs, and they were beginning to see them as intricate systems of circulation.
However, no early modern figure invoked the word to describe groups of interconnected people.8 Individuals made networks; they did not participate in them. Instead these letter writers had friends. As a young John Perceval declared, “Other things are but the luxerys of life, our friends are the necessarys.”9 They were necessary for their affection, for their conversation, and most importantly for the actions they could take on one’s behalf. Letter writers often referred to friends in the plural. It was not a single friend that Perceval saw as necessary, but a host of friends. Peter Collinson enjoyed reading Bartram’s single letter, but he was truly happy when he could scatter his multiple letters across his counter and enjoy “the Company of my friends.” In his letters, William Byrd I of Virginia referred to “all our friends” eighteen times.10 His letters sought to connect and weave together his different threads of friendship. For another correspondent, friends formed a strong tree with deep roots and vast branches. When a friend died he decried the loss of “a branch lopt off from the tree of friendship, which I have long cultivated.”11 But isolated trees these were not. One could mobilize and use the friends of others. When one of Peter Collinson’s correspondents discovered that his friends had failed to repay the “so many hundred obligations” they owed Collinson, he swore “never to molest you with any more of my recommendations.”12 This grafting of friendship failed. Others, however, took root and allowed branches to intertwine, as in old growth forests, producing a canopy of friendship.
These early modern invocations of friendship do not stray far from modern definitions of networks. For one mid-twentieth-century sociologist, the term network encapsulated the idea that “each person has a number of friends, and these friends have their own friends; some of any one person’s friends know each other, others do not.”13 The distance between the terms is not vast, and the meanings are similar. So, while anachronistic, the word network encapsulates the ways letter writers envisioned their social worlds. It focuses attention on the links between individuals, rather than on the individuals themselves and keeps such historically weighted terms as “friendship,” “neighbourliness,” and “community” in the background.14 Those living in the early modern world strategically used these terms, and while I acknowledge and investigate their complex uses, I do not want them to dominate the discussion since they isolate rather than bring together what was actually occurring. As scholars have insisted, words such as “community” are difficult.15 They bring in their wake layers of historiographic argument and, more important, a nostalgia that complicates historical inquiry.
The term “network” is not new to scholars, but it remains messy and vague.16 Historians rarely interrogate its meaning, which has disguised the networking practices of the British during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Digging into the vagueness of the term and tracing how historians have employed it pushes to the surface a vast constellation of networks of different sizes, shapes, and purposes. It is that array of networks, their role, and the place of the letter in nurturing them that is the subject of this book.
Networks first became an important word for historians in the second half of the twentieth century. By this time the term commonly evoked a set of relations between individuals, but the use of the term remained metaphorical.17 Unhappy with this state of affairs, early modern social historians, influenced by sociologists, attempted to employ the term more precisely and use it analytically.18 As one sociologist described it in 1969, social network analysis was to provide “non-quantitative mathematical ways of rigorously stating the implications entailed in a set of relationships among a number of persons.”19 Rigor and mathematical tools were the hopes of the day. Early modern social historians saw in this approach a method through which, using parish and other records, they could reconstruct, to the degree possible, the nature and structure of past communities.20 Networks, for these historians, were webs of social support that undergirded the functioning of local societies. They were an especially useful way to describe kinship relations and it was their interior nature, their tight knit or loose structure, that provoked discussion.21 Networks emerge here as constant structures deeply tied to a single location.22 They provided the underlying hum of society.
While social historians drifted away from networks and began to focus on how early modern peoples thought about and spoke about social relationships, networks as analytical tools were not dead.23 Historians of science and knowledge in general and scholars of ethnic and religious diasporas found networks useful. But their networks were different from those outlined by social historians. These networks were more fluid, more fragile, and more geographically expansive. They were the product of a shared belief, need, or interest. They became more important at specific points in time. The multiplication of religious identities in the Reformation, for example, pushed networks into action. With religious upheaval, persecution, and proselytizing zeal came exile and migration, which could separate individuals from secular networks of support and scatter them geographically.24 Historians of religious networks, however, rarely consider the type of networks their adherents formed in their struggles.
Historians of science are more aware of the nature of their subjects’ networks. A growing interest in the social processes of knowledge creation and the influence of actor network theory, developed by sociologists Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, inspired these scholars to look more deeply at networks.25 These webs of connection did not determine the structure of individual lives or help an isolated community united through belief survive; rather, they processed information and artifacts. These historians focused on how their singular networks functioned. While interested in the interior nature of networks like social historians, the quality of the links, strong or weak, between networks also drew them.26 It was these links that could help explicate the formation of knowledge and the workings of the larger intellectual world. Tracing networks also allowed them to highlight the geographic breadth of the world of knowledge. For these scholars networks were fragile, unanchored to place, and supplemental to deeply embedded social networks.27
The creators of both intellectual and religious networks demonstrated a disregard for national boundaries and a celebration of geographic mobility that this project emphasizes.28 Networks allow us to follow people rather than institutions or states.29 This concentration on people and lack of concern regarding national boundaries has drawn Atlantic historians to networks. For example, Bernard Bailyn has noted, when mapping out the concepts and contours of Atlantic history, that “there were Atlantic networks everywhere—economic, religious, social, cultural.”30 Migration, forced and voluntary, often made networks, old and new, necessary.31 Atlantic historians have traced a number of these social and religious networks, but historians of economic networks, especially those involving trade, have scrutinized the term most intensely.32 For David Hancock, decentralized networks played an especially vital role in trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.33 Like intellectual and religious networks, business networks were fragile, changeable, and engaged only obliquely with dense social networks. And, as scholars of the Atlantic world are beginning to see, such networks