Testing the "trickle-down" theory through GECEM database: consumer behaviour, Chinese goods, and trade networks in the Western Mediterranean, 1730–1808.

Economic historians have used GDP and its backwards projections to quantify economic growth and the process of early globalisation from year 1 CE to the present day. This has generated a lively debate concerning which methodologies are the most accurate for quantitative history and which data are most reliable. In addition, whilst an overwhelming amount of scholarship has emerged on the supply side, the demand side and family economic changes have been less popular in economic history. In this article, I present a concrete case study to analyse consumer behaviour: the circulation of Chinese goods in western Mediterranean markets during the eighteenth century. In so doing, I test the "trickle-down" theory with new archival data using GECEM Project Database, and apply the OLS and SNA to measure the social distribution of these goods through trade networks' intermediation. The main result is that the agency of middle social groups—mainly merchants—was changing consumers' behaviour in western Mediterranean markets, and not local oligarchies and nobility as the "trickle-down" theory has conventionally assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]