Networks were crucial in the first wave of globalization (1870-1913). The conquest of distance was possible thanks to increasingly redundant networks of transportation (railways, shipping lines) and communication (mail and telegraph). Likewise, the dramatic rise in financial flows in the later quarter of the 19h century required innovative technologies to acquire information and pool risk across industries and continents. Many of these depended on networks, such as news agencies, credit ratings agencies, currency trading, multinational banks and banking syndicates. Less appreciated in the literature is the fact that networks generate externalities, which can influence behaviour in ways that are difficult to capture in models that assume agents act independently. This setting raises a threat to identification in classical regression analysis. This session contributes to a budding literature that explicitly models financial links as part of a network of interdependent relations by drawing on recent methodological developments in network analysis.