‘Betweenness’

Abstract In his highly influential 1973 paper, ‘The strength of weak ties’, Mark Granovetter argued that people’s social worlds tend to be made up of strong and weak ties, but that weak ties are much more important for the transmission of information. Chapter 3 explores the extent to which we can identify such weak links in the transmission of early modern intelligence with a particular off-the-shelf algorithm: ‘betweenness centrality’. Betweenness centrality reveals that the quickest routes through the Tudor epistolary network are both via central government hubs and bridging figures. By using a second network metric, the degree of a node, we can sort the bridges from the hubs. As a result this chapter is able to demonstrate how the key figures for the transmission of information, both across communities and geographical remove, are a heterogeneous body of figures who served diplomatic functions both formal and informal, including international intellectuals, bishops and reformers, merchants, military leaders, and soldiers.