Structure and Evolution of the World's Historical Trade Patterns

International trade has been an important driver for the development of our modern world, but capturing trade patterns and their change over time continues to prove a daunting task. Painting a detailed picture of historical trade patterns not only puts a high demand on the availability and quality of data, it also begs for an intuitive and succinct way to describe the resulting patterns. To uncover the overall patterns in the data we adopt the complex network perspective. After constructing the historical trade integration network, we use temporal stochastic block models to extract the meso-scale network structure. This SBM methodology makes full use of all available data, takes the time dimension into account and does not make a priori assumptions about the structure of the network