The Past Speaks

In the last few months, Andrew Smith (University of Liverpool Management School) has been contributing to the timber project in several ways.

First, he has been supervising the collection trade statistics so that we can reconstruct the international flows of timber in the nineteenth century. Collecting the data has been involved looking at the table of figures that were printed each year in the British parliamentary papers and then entering the relevant numbers into an Excel file. This essential data entry work has been performed by an able Research Assistant working under Andrew’s supervision. (The able RA in question is Joe Kelly, a PhD student over in Liverpool’s history department). Andrew has been responsible for analysing the resulting data and turning it into a form useful to other members of the project. He has also engaged in archival research about the international timber trade, using materials in the University…