This chapter uses digital humanities approaches to discover the computational signature of the idea of government in the British eighteenth century. Data mining techniques are applied to the large dataset Eighteenth Century Collections Online in order to ascertain the precise composition of the idea of government and to track its evolution over the entire century. The connections between government and despotism are explored in the concluding argument.

The South Sea Bubble of 1720 was Britain’s first modern financial crisis. This chapter uses digital tools to study the development, during the early eighteenth century, of a conceptual framework describing bubbles in the financial market. It traces the emergence of the phrase ‘South Sea Bubble’ in the months and years after the crisis, alongside the more complicated patterns of evolution in what that phrase describes, ultimately arguing that there is little resemblance between the ‘South Sea Bubble’ of the 1720s and that of the present-day historical imagination. The chapter’s final claim is that the conceptual framework underpinning how we understand present-day financial crises has its origins in the latency of the words used, at the time, to describe the emerging and interlinked crises of 1720.

Can the claim that the United States of America was founded on the principles of republicanism? This chapter uses digital humanities approaches and the tools developed by the Cambridge Concept Lab to pose this question, and it concludes that such a contention must be false. The chapter demonstrates that the idea of republicanism, as an ideology or set of beliefs about the nature of government and society was not availlable to the colonists at the time of the founding.

This chapter uses methods in text mining in order to trace the history of the idea of liberty between 1600 and 1800. It seeks to investigate the standard account of this idea developed most rigorously by Quentin Skinner over many years. Using quantitative methods and the tools created by the Cambridge Concept Lab, it discovers a slightly different history from the standard accounts that complements and augments that history.

This chapter investigates and tests the methodological choices that must be made when creating a conceptual network visualisation from a large text corpus. We often discuss the architecture of complex concepts using metaphors that suggest networked representations. We might speak of a ‘constellation’ or ‘skeleton’ of elementary concepts that has a core, a periphery and sections that are mutually supportive or interlocking. Underlying this metaphor is the notion that concepts are composed of structured associations among many elements, building from words to tightly formed clusters of words to large interlocking architectural forms that give rise to abstract concepts. To build such a network from language, we must operationalise several informal notions, including word association strength, connection thresholds and the total size of the network. This chapter discusses the process of constructing and testing these methods, illustrating the trade-offs and implications of different implementations used when building visualisations of conceptual networks built from lexical co-occurrence data. When the calculations that operationalise the notions of word association and conceptual relation are laid out in detail, it becomes apparent that the choice of implementation cannot be separated from the substantive or theoretical kind of conceptual structure that we aim to capture.

This chapter examines a core hypothesis of the intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck: that modern political concepts underwent an accelerated period of change during the latter half of the eigheenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, a period he calls the ‘Sattelzeit’ or hinge period of intellectual history. Adapting word embedding models and metrics of novelty and the pace of change, this chapter helps to measure, visualise and disentangle the precise semantic transformations occuring at this threshold period: the consolidation of Koselleck’s ‘collective singular’ noun, for example, appears alongside a host of other cultural, technological, intellectual innovations in word usage. Finally, the data reveal not one but two revolutionary semantic periods between 1720 and 1960, a finding which both troubles the concept of a Sattelzeit while also extending it into new discursive, historical – and digital – contexts.

Using a new visualisation technique for word embedding data, this chapter explores the formation of complex, compound concepts in the late eighteenth century, focusing specifically on ‘political revolution’. Word embedding models offer an alternative method of understanding relationships between terms, both as a function of proximity (as in collocation) and of shared contexts (as in synonyms). By measuring the direct distance within the embedding space between two words over time in a series of aligned models, we can witness two parts of a compound idea bind together and observe which terms provide the binding force between them. Using this method, I explore the way that ‘revolution’ travels across the eighteenth century in relation to the ‘political’. Although loosely linked in the wake of the Glorious Revolution at the outset of the century, revolution becomes heavily tied to Newtonian mechanics, before being pulled back into political usage during the French Revolution. The method I introduce here reveals the hidden connections to ‘science’ in both political and revolution that undergirds their eventual merger into the idea of ‘political revolution’ that we have inherited today.

This chapter probes the conceptual architecture of irritability in the eighteenth century. It justifies this case study not through a pre-established research agenda but because automated statistical comparisons reveal a marked transformation both in the term itself and in the broader network in which it is embedded. Irritability has long been marginalised in favour of its sister term, sensibility; yet we demonstrate the abiding significance of the former, in a variety of canonical works (Erasmus Darwin, Edmund Burke) and less familiar medical handbooks. This largely overlooked medical discourse infuses broader thinking on gender, colonialism and aesthetics; it worries the distinction between human and non-human life. We conclude by proving that the emergence of the irritability network holds significant consequences for other forms of conceptual thinking. In particular, we show how it affords a rethinking of the notion of habit, and facilitates the transformation of the cultural concept of system from a largely Newtonian and mechanistic notion, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, to an increasingly dynamical and physiological entity.

This chapter models the idea of economic growth in the period of the Enlightenment in Britain. Using methods developed in the Cambridge Concept Lab, it demonstrates that the ideas of improvement and progress supported the slow evolution of the notion of economic growth as a necessary good. It tracks the thinking of the philosopher and political economist Adam Smith as he formulated his ideas with respect to size and operation of modern capitalist economies.

The political theorist and intellectual historian Istvan Hont argued that the term ‘commercial society’ was used by Adam Smith in ways that were distinct from any of his peers. Smith, Hont claims, ‘stretched’ the term in order to ‘make it a theoretical object for moral and political inquiry’. This chapter engages with this argument using computational methods for interrogating datasets of varying sizes.

The first, a custom-produced ‘Adam Smith’ corpus, is compared with a ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ corpus, both of which have been extracted from the larger Eighteenth Century Collections Online dataset. For the second of these datasets, a list of publishers’ names has been collated, from existing scholarly enquiries by Richard B. Sher and Andrew Hook, to construct a dataset that enables one to inspect and interrogate what might be thought of as the distinctively Scottish history of ideas in the period within which Smith wrote his seminal works.

The comparative method allows us to test Hont’s assertion that Smith deployed the concept of ‘commercial society’ idiosyncratically by charting the extent to which the features of Smith’s thinking were adopted by his contemporaries, firstly within the Scottish context, and secondly within anglophone culture of the period as represented by Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

This chapter outlines a novel method for discerning the structure and history of concepts and their aggregation as ideas. Based on the analysis of co-ocurrence data in large data sets, the method creates a measure of ‘binding’ that allows one to inspect the larger constellations of words and concepts that comprise ideas which can be tracked diachronically. The chapter also describes the method used for ascertaining the ‘binding’ between concepts, and for modelling ‘ideas’. A detailed account of how the ‘shared lexis tool’ was built is also included.