About the Team

We are a team of six sophomores from an Information, Society & Culture project of the Bass Connections undergraduate research program at Duke University. Theodora Harmsworth is studying Economics and Public Policy; Charlotte Lim is studying Public Policy and Philosophy; Ioana Lungescu is studying Economics and History; Dan Reznichenko is studying Economics and English; Heidi Smith is studying Computer Science, English, and Information Science; Amy Weng is studying Computer Science and Information Science.

 

About the Project

Background

Is there a right type and amount of consumption? The idea of ethical consumption has gained prominence in recent discourse, both in terms of what we purchase (from fair trade coffee to carbon offsets) and how much we consume (from rechargeable batteries to energy efficient homes). These modes of ethical consumerism assume that individuals become political, as well as economic, actors through shopping. 

Medieval and Renaissance authors regularly debated the relationship between consumption and labor: were certain goods unethical in themselves, or did attitudes toward them depend on the manner in which they were consumed? These questions and others like them were highly contested and have shaped modern discourse around the ethics of consumption, making it critical to understand how premodern people understood the relationship between consumer culture and living ethically.

Description

This project seeks to build understanding of the nature of premodern discourses of ethical consumption through tracking the relationship between consumer culture and ethics in language. Understanding the premodern antecedents to the discourse of ethical consumption requires dual approaches: a qualitative one that carefully and closely reads the explicit exhortations in ethical literature toward behaving justly in the market, and a data-driven one that is capable of identifying how linguistic traces of this ethical discourse are created, borrowed, abandoned and reformulated over a large textual corpus. Building on the 2021 Data+ project’s research, team members will explore the traditional archives of both Duke and Birmingham-Southern College. The team will study the discourse of ethical consumerism using both computational methodologies and archival research. Team members will analyze the approximately 60,000 Medieval and Renaissance texts that were made available by the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership in 2020. They will also identify, apply to and prepare a poster and/or oral presentation for an appropriate conference in the U.S.

2021-2022 Bass Connections Team

In the 2021-2022 academic year, the Bass Connections Team at Duke University examined various attitudes towards consumption in different domains ranging from politics to economics and ethics.  

Charlotte and Dan examined texts by contemporaneous authors, modern day historians, and economic philosophers, most notably Bernard de Mandeville and Alasdair Macintyre, to investigate the ethical concerns surrounding the consumption of goods.

Ioana and Dora explored the legal and historical repercussions of the East India Company’s trade monopoly.

Amy and Heidi used computational tools to analyze texts found within the Early English Books Online database. See the About Our Dataset page for more details on our data. They worked on word cloud generation, topic modeling for text filtering, word embedding, and pattern-finding in the metadata (e.g., authors, publishers, etc.) of the dataset. They also engaged with scholarship in the digital humanities field to contextualize their research. 

During the Spring 2022 semester, the team focused their research to prepare for the NeMLA conference held in Baltimore, MD.  

NeMLA Conference

ABSTRACT:

Caring for a Corrupt Corpus: Ethical and Legal Standpoints on English Consumption (1660-1714)

Did the monopoly of the English East India Company benefit or corrupt England? The literature of the English Restoration (1660-1688) both influenced and was influenced by the growing political and economic relevance of joint-stock companies and international trade. The legislative changes of this period reflected and further shaped normative attitudes concerning consumption and commerce.

Early modern commentators on the political economy integrated these attitudes in their writings by borrowing medical language like “consumption” and the “body politic.” For instance, writers like Gerard de Malynes (fl. 1586-1623) used this lens of physical and mental health to diagnose economic problems and propose remedies. We examine the rhetorical devices that writers used to describe “monopoly” and their relationship to the care of the national body.  

Further study of “monopoly” comes from a close analysis of court cases regarding the legality of the East India Company’s trade. We compare the contemporary legal status of monopolies to the ambiguous ethical discussion surrounding them. Our inquiry is informed by the economic theories of the physician Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) and his predecessors; we contrast the language, arguments, and rulings of the cases with these philosophers’ work in an effort to understand the evolving ethical landscape inspired by these jurists. 

Finally, we apply “distant reading” techniques to the Early English Books Online (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebogroup/) database to uncover patterns within early modern discourses of monopolies. We investigate whether there were any changes in the attitudes toward the East India Company’s monopoly before and after the Restoration. While acknowledging the limitations of quantitative research on archival materials, we use computational methods to track frequent words, topics, and sentiments. Using this interdisciplinary approach, we hope to uncover the dynamics of the relationship of early capitalism with ethics.

Common Terms/Abbreviations Defined

• EIC: The English East India Company
• EEBO: Early English Books Online, a database of works which we used for our computational research
• TCP: Text Creation Partnership
• ECBC: Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism
• Body Politick: A civic body/society represented metaphorically as a physical body. The sovereign is typically represented as the body’s head.
• Monopoly/trade monopoly: Exclusive rights for a company in a particular trade, e.g., trade in the East Indies, granted by royal authority
• Consumption/Consume:
  • To eat or drink something
  • To use up a resource
  • A wasting disease, primarily tuberculosis
• Canker: Early English physicians used the term canker to refer to a cancer. The word originates from the Latin word ‘cancer.’ Economic writers like Gerard Malynes would use the term as a rhetorical device, illustrating how a certain policy had a similar, wasting effect on the body politic.