The Cozens/Byrnes Merchants Networks Project - Updated 8 February 2010

If you value the information posted here, and the project of this history website in general, you may like to consider making a donation to help reduce our production costs. It would be greatly appreciated. Options include: paying via PayPal which this website uses - Ed

A website intended to be of greatest use for anyone interested in economic history ... maritime history ...

A project seldom if ever developed for the Internet ... a website to return to ...

Apologies to netsurfers: Temporarily ... This website is now having its navigation system redesigned. For 2010, for any navigation question (depending on which page you landed on via a search engine if you did not land on this index page), go first to the sitemap. The sitemap presents a complete and hyperlinked list of files comprising the website in alphabetical order - Editor

New Timeline/Chronology files now appearing on this website in series 0-21 from the first file available - Timelines0- Click here

This website is a new and major excursion beginning with examinations of Merchant Networks in the general context of The British Empire during its first and second foundings.

Or, more generally, merchants operating in the English-speaking world ... from the 1680s to about 1900 ... All to be seen in a more detailed way than attempted before on the Internet ...

Note 1: Of 29 April 2009: Announcing the first upload of a new set of files for this website, a concerted attack on the ways in which US "paranoid conspiracy theorists" active on the Internet since 1997 or so have been dabbling with economic history in order to confuse the more ignorant members of the US electorate. Chief of the "theorists" to be countered is Lyndon LaRouche, one of the most virulent of such US commentators. For this series, the directory and filenames concerned are gathered under the umbrella-heading of "gaps" in history. Go now to the first file: gaps.htm and follows in series.

Note 2: From February 2010, the The Merchant Networks Project will be unveiling a new website feature which has been long in planning ... a new set of Timeline files on shipping movements during major periods of European activity. The series of seven files so far begins about 1600 and will proceed to near 1900. That is, it will finally treat aspects of the transitions from the use of sailing ships to the use of steam-powered ships. These files are simple HTML webpages and will be searchable only via alpha-numeric queries in your searcher/word finder in your browser. The files will list ship voyages by date, with entries often being findable by shipowner, captain name, ship name. (The original listings were begun by being built around normally-available data on convict ships sailing to Australia 1788++) Listings on eg, trans-Atlantic shipping in different timeframes, or European shipping to China will be added in due course.
Once this new feature of the website is in operation, navigation of the site will be rejigged and improved - Editor

These files begin at the following URL: Shipping Timelines

Click here to discover ... Who links to this Merchant Networks website?

Click here to read a new promotional page for this website translated into Chinese

The two writers/researchers behind the Merchant Networks Project are Ken Cozens (in London) and Dan Byrnes (Australia).

The Cozens/Byrnes team formed in late 2005 after prolonged e-mail discussions to pursue the idea of historians working on Merchant Networks. Not work on merchants as individuals, more on the networks they are part of ...

for more on the details of this approach, see The About Us Page

[And, yes, this project could also become something like a surfable book, or a website book ... an idea we first met in the late 1990s, and an idea we feel is well worth pursuing on the Internet in a variety of formats!]

Note: Material presented on this website is researched, compiled/recompiled and written by Ken Cozens and Dan Byrnes, unless otherwise indicated. Formatting and style of information delivery is © Kenneth J. Cozens (London) and Dan Byrnes (Australia) 2006=2008.

(Where " -Ed" is referred to in text in various files, it mostly refers to Dan Byrnes as the webmaster for this project)

This website was relaunched on the Net on 4 July 2006 at: www.merchantnetworks.com.au
E-mail the Webmaster: Dan Byrnes

About the authors:

Pictures: Kenneth J. Cozens and Dan Byrnes (with camera).

Ken Cozens (at right) has had a long interest in Thames-side history and British maritime history. He gained his Masters degree in History at Greenwich University in 2005. (At Greenwich Maritime Institute.) He has lately become more interested in using a variety of website technology to promote his interests in history.

Dan Byrnes has a deep interest in the history of convict transportation from England/Britain to both North America and Australia. He gained an Honours degree in History from University of New England (Australia) in 1996.

And so ... this website is a contemporary Anglo-Australian production ...

Webmaster of the Merchant Networks Project, Dan Byrnes, is the author behind The Blackheath Connection, a major work on the history of the transportation of convicts from England to North America and then Australia, 1717-1810.

Website history: Please note: This website was first launched on the Net by 20 May 2006 as a subset of a personal website from Australia. It was re-launched as a website on its own domain at its present URL on 4 July 2006. - Ed

Tech update: 7 June 2007: This website is lately made with open source web editor kit Quanta Plus and produced with a Linux system running ...

View web stats from www.statcounter.com/ for this website begun 4 July 2006