A few lectures ago when we started talking about power in networks and how certain nodes can have more power than others, I was reminded about a book that forms a central part of the literature that my thesis uses. The book in question is Albert O. Hirschman’s National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (1945). I couldn’t find a version of the book online (and any would probably have dubious legality), but Cornell provides a summary of it and another similar work at:
Hirschman examined Nazi Germany’s use of commerce during the 1930s to compel smaller states in Eastern Europe to comply with it politically. He argued that given two states A and B with some volume of trade with each other, the state for which that trade comprised a greater portion of its total trade (say B) would likely be more dependent on that trade than the other. In B, a greater proportion of the population likely benefited from this trade and would be hurt economically if it ended. These individuals would thus pressure their government to do whatever was necessary to maintain or even expand that trade. State A would likely face similar pressures, but on a much lower level and would thus be less dependent (meaning that it had more power). Subsequent literature’s muddied the picture a bit and added several important considerations, but the basic idea still stands.
This ties in neatly with the idea brought up in lecture that a node with fewer edges (and thus more dependent on each edge) was likely to have less power than one with many edges. The similarities between these two could be strengthened even further if we were to give valuations for the edges – where one node values some edges more than others. Similarly, a state that had many trading edges with very small values could probably get away politically with getting rid of one or two, but one with only a few high-value edges probably could not without serious domestic political repercussions.
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