“David Lazer”:http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/netgov/2010/06/the_emergence_of_international_order.html blogs an animation by Sune Lehmann of his data on the spread of Most Favored Nation trade agreements in the 1860s.
bq. The relative free trade regime that emerged in the 1860s is often taken as a case study of the role of hierarchy in the international system, where, the story goes, the hegemon, Great Britain, imposed on the international order a set of rules that served its own interests in free trade. This is a perspective I critiqued in a paper in World Politics … the international order was emergent, with a foundation of a set of bilateral most favored nations, and the result of the interplay of domestic interests with the rapidly evolving international economy. … The cost to producers of industrial and differentiated goods (but not homogeneous goods) of being discriminated against in another state’s markets thus must have increased through the 19th century. This trend set the stage for an “epidemic” of most favored nation treaties, starting with a treaty between France and Britain in 1860. This treaty, I argue, created a concern by other industrializing countries that their goods would be shut out of France, … countries signed treaties with France, which then created additional concerns about being shut out of French (and other) markets, spurring yet more treaties. Britain, because it generally had low trade barriers already, was in a relatively peripheral position in this treaty network. …Key things to focus on include the temporal order of treaty signings, the role of geography in determining who signed treaties with whom, and the position of Great Britain in the emerging network.
An animation over time likes this allows one to really see what is going on much better than, say, a set of snapshot graphs. It would be nice if journals (when they really start moving on line), could set up protocols to include this kind of data presentation.