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Navigating political action typically requires coalition building across different interest groups. Because members represent divergent interests and are embedded in different networks, however, alliance formation is difficult. In this article, I consider how elites rely on political brokerage to overcome these divisions and form successful coalitions, with successful organization of the parliamentary opposition to the king before the English Civil War as a case in point. Supporting quantitative evidence comes from rich network data on the business, kinship, and political affiliations among 346 political and mercantile elites. Rather than the mere presence of mediator positions, I argue that effective brokerage of mobilizing alliances between interest groups requires political mediators who are equally affiliated with these diverse networks. Successful brokerage is conditional on both their structural position between groups and the diversity of ties that compose their personal networks. The results demonstrate that new merchant elites who were engaged in the American colonial trades acted as political mediators and facilitated the formation of a parliamentary opposition strong enough to defeat the royalist forces in London.
Navigating political action often requires elites to build coalitions among different interest groups. The very fact that their coalition partners represent divergent interests, however, makes the formation of such alliances difficult. How, then, do elites overcome these divisions and form successful political coalitions?
Valuable insights have come from studies demonstrating the importance of social networks for political mobilization in historical contexts (Bearman 1993; Gould 1995; Padgett and Ansell 1993). The central argument is that mobilization follows from patterns of concrete interaction networks that connect people, rather than from ascribed categories such as socioeconomic class or ethnic and cultural differences. Likewise, evidence from such work strongly suggests that the naming of friends and enemies-"Cavaliers" versus "Roundheads" or "the Godly" versus "Papists"-is rarely the cause for observed alignments. Instead, such group identifications appear as convenient labels once their network-based alignments sort people into opposing groups.
One consequence of this fundamental insight has been a turn away from broad class-based comparisons toward a renewed emphasis on the role of elite conflict for understanding rebellions, revolutions, state building, and similar historical transformations (Lachmann 2000). Research on historical networks has also moved beyond considering single networks and begun to examine how the intersection of multiple...