Social capital and company formation: household networks and entry into the East India Company, 1599-1600

This deposit contains the datasets, the name-linking decisions and the Stata code needed to reproduce every result in the article "Social capital and company formation: household networks and entry into the East India Company, 1599-1600". The article asks which of London's established Levant merchants took up the East India venture and which did not. A roster of Levant Company freemen drawn up in June 1600 and preserved among the Cecil Papers names eighty-one men, twenty-five of whom appear in the East India charter sealed six months later. That list supplies a comparison group of merchants who could have joined and declined, which prior work on the 1599 subscription has not had. Three sources underlie the data, all published and freely available. The subscription list of 22 September 1599, with the meeting of 24 September that named the directors and treasurers and set the £200 minimum stake, is taken from W. N. Sainsbury (ed.), Calendar of State Papers Colonial, East Indies, China and Japan, vol. 2, 1513-1616 (London, 1864), pp. 99-102, calendared from the East India Company Court Book, vol. I. Levant Company membership and the June 1600 roster of freemen with their sons and servants derive from David Wilson, Earliest Levant Company Members (September 2017), a compilation of the Turkey (1581), Venice (1583) and Levant (1592, 1600, 1605) charters together with the Cecil list printed in Calendar of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House, vol. 10 (London, 1904), pp. 214-17. Wilson's compilation is his own copyright and is not redistributed here; what is deposited is the structured dataset derived from it, and his caution that he worked from printed editions rather than manuscripts, that spellings vary, and that men of the same name may in places have been conflated, applies to everything built on it. Files: eic_1599_subscriptions.csv (101 entries as printed, totalling £30,133 6s 8d); eic_1599_persons.csv (137 named individuals with per-head shares); subscribers_classified.csv (136 distinct subscribers under strict and moderate Levant codings, with the director indicator); eic_1599_syndicate_roster.csv (the multi-member entries, with the men named in each); eic_1599_lookup_priority.csv (the biographical lookup queue); levant_analysis.csv (203 men, charter flags, tie counts and subscription link; the estimation sample is cecil == 1, giving 81 observations of which 25 entered); levant_ties.csv (246 sons and factors with kin and death flags, 41 kin and 205 factors); unmatched_1599.csv (97 unmatched subscribers with near-miss candidates, the audit trail for the eighteen linking decisions); eic_levant_analysis.dta (the estimation file the do-file reads); replication_EIC_Levant.do (Stata 19.5, no working-directory commands); and the two figures as published, at 300 dpi. A README describes the coding rules and the three codings under which results are reported. The eighty-one freemen are the full recorded population rather than a sample, so standard errors in the article are read under a superpopulation interpretation following Gill (1999) and Abadie, Athey, Imbens and Wooldridge (2020), and results are discussed by magnitude and interval.