Britain's imperial expansion connected it with markets across Asia and the Americas, yet a new analysis of maritime records highlights the predominance of trade closer to home. Shorter routes within Britain and to other European countries accounted for a significant majority of commerce as the empire grew between the late 16th and mid-18th centuries. In 1696 and 1697, European markets generated 80 percent of the value of Britain's global trade.
Historians at the University of Southampton created a searchable online database using hundreds of thousands of handwritten pages of port records dating from 1565 onward. Artificial intelligence software was trained to interpret individual officials' handwriting, unusual notations and historical spelling variations. Manual verification remained necessary, but the technology substantially accelerated extraction and organization. Users can filter records by vessel, commodity, departure port, destination or year, then trace shipping routes on a digital map produced by the university's GeoData Institute.
The resulting network encompasses more than 3,000 ports worldwide, over 1,000 of them in Britain. Coal dominated the analyzed cargo records, appearing in more than 101,000 entries, followed by malt, wheat, iron, wool and wine. Coastal shipping moved coal, grain and other essential commodities between English ports, providing a fundamental economic connection. Baltic timber also supplied Britain's shipbuilding programs. Meanwhile, entries for children's toys from China, animal skins and Venice treacle—a medicine once believed to cure almost any ailment—illustrate the wider reach of imperial trade.
