An Explorative Approach to the Quantitative Ranking of Historical Countries in Terms of Prominence Using PageRank

摘要

This paper presents a novel algorithmic technique to quantitatively rank the relative importance and power of countries throughout history. The algorithm is based on PageRank, the kernel of Google's webpage ranking algorithm. Changes are suggested to enable PageRank to rank countries based on historic signed political and trade treaties. Relative changes in the ranking of countries can be observed by executing the algorithm on a sliding window over time. The algorithm is demonstrated on a case study period. The results show that the proposed approach does indeed rank countries sensibly in the period under consideration.