Abstract
England’s continental rivals frequently disparaged the country as “a nation of shopkeepers.” Adam Smith, who coined the phrase, had observed that, “To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers” (Smith [1776]1976:613). Yes, that same England built a global empire on the shoulders of trade and a mighty navy, but it also birthed the Industrial Revolution that changed the world forever and continues to enrich it. Careful examination of economic history indicates that domestic institutions and policies that fostered innovation and expanded markets were more important than colonial plunder in bringing self-sustaining economies to life (Koyama and Rubin 2022).
In the fascinating Trade and Nation: How Companies and Politics Reshaped Economic Thought, Emily Erikson draws on economic sociology and social network analysis to help explain how England’s merchants rose to influence. Erikson’s explanation homes in on two particularities of the English case. The first was the relatively marginal position occupied by the merchant classes in the sixteenth-century English state that compelled them to make their case to the public. The second was the relatively advanced state of the English public sphere. Thriving print capitalism meant that there was a market for new ideas. The competitive discipline imposed on arguments in the public sphere compelled writers to advocate for favorable policies in logical and practical terms and to back contentions with rigorous evidence.
In other words, English merchants learned to lobby government from the outside in, persuading their countrymen to support policies that would advance the country’s trade. Locked out of influence in the Crown and the Parliament for most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, marginalization created incentives to express interests in innovative and compelling ways. The formation of companies brought merchants together in communities that propelled and shaped a new economic discourse. Modern economic thinking thus arose in books and pamphlets that endeavored to convince Englishmen that trade would advance the nation’s wealth and power.
Erikson’s study impresses the reader in several ways. Drawing on a vast corpus of printed works preserved in libraries and archives and recently made machine readable, it uses computational text analysis to examine the new discourse of politics and commerce that occurred beginning in the late sixteenth century through the early eighteenth century. She contends that modern economic thought, with its emphasis on efficiency and growth, is different from traditional economic thought, which focused on morality, equity, and welfare. Enabled by the expanding business of print, England’s merchants tried to convince the reading public of the necessity of government action to grant favorable concessions to their companies. Readers were naturally suspicious of arguments framed in terms of narrow self-interest, so early economic thinkers learned to back their assertions with arguments supported by evidence. Over time, a primarily moral and religious economic discourse gave way to practical reasoning and empirical generalization. Private interests learned how to harmonize their tune with paeans for the public good. After two centuries of publishing on matters related to trade and nation, this line of thinking culminated in and was given canonical status by Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
Erikson’s book is not a standard contribution to the history of ideas. It brings to the subject new approaches from network science and the digital humanities. Concentrating on the period between 1580 and 1720, Erikson combines several print archives, assembling thousands of printed texts. Her massive effort reveals that the output of what she classifies as economic works grew from a mere trickle to a mighty stream. Previously, scholars explained the rise of economic analysis by international rivalries that led governments to commission the production of new ideas, by the need for practical policies that would enhance revenues, and by the status aspirations of a nascent mercantile elite. Erikson acknowledges these impulses but notes that they were common to several European states (most importantly the Netherlands) but that it was only England that fathered modern economic thought.
To describe and analyze such a vast corpus of texts, Erikson applies computational techniques, social network analysis, and statistics. Various chapters examine the topical features of the text corpus, the changing character of economic discourse, the social characteristics of authors, and the relationships between authors and companies. A final chapter compares England to the Netherlands, the country most like it.
Using structural topic modeling, Erikson identifies five recognizable topic clusters in early economic literature that she characterizes as religion/morality, politics, husbandry, travel, and trade/finance/prosperity. By comparing these clusters over time, Erikson shows that religion and husbandry, the more traditional topical clusters, decline in importance because their share of texts is eclipsed by discussions of politics and trade. Erikson (pp. 48–49) suggests that this reveals the secularization of economic thought and a shift in the dominant discourse away from morality to practical reason. These shifts occurred as the public sphere itself was expanding because of a massive increase in printed works during the same period.
As keen as Erikson is to suggest that modern economic discourse secularized, that was not what I thought her data showed. Whereas the growing prominence of trade and politics is clear from the data over time, it is somewhat misleading to argue that religion falls by the wayside. True, religion does not dominate the discourse in the early eighteenth century, but it had not declined in absolute or relative terms either. In the period 1580 to 1599, Erikson’s models classify about 25 percent of publications as religious. In the period 1700 to 1720, about 24 percent of the publications are religious. It is another domain of traditional economic discourse—husbandry—that virtually disappears, falling from 44.7 percent to just 1.6 percent of all texts during the same period. Publications on trade and politics appear to surge at husbandry’s expense (see pp. 58–60).
Rather than taking up “smaller and smaller sections of the larger whole” (p. 60), religion holds its own. This suggests a different interpretation in which rather than secularizing, religious and moral thought coexisted in economic discourse alongside pragmatic and empirical thought. Perhaps this indicates something important about the culture of Protestantism that enabled the Northern European bourgeoisie to embrace expedience in worldly affairs, understanding their this-worldly activities as being different but complimentary to their spiritual obligations. If so, then religion did not so much retreat from worldly affairs as accommodate new arguments for practicality in the service of godly interests. Scholars have long argued that in the Reformation’s wake traditionalism gave way to rationalism, with Protestantism abetting that shift (Becker, Pfaff, and Rubin 2016).
I found Erikson’s analysis of the authorship of economic texts particularly instructive in terms of the class and occupational status of authors. She identifies over two thousand authors, of which professionals (32 percent) and merchants (26 percent) are the largest groups. Erikson suggests how economics became the discourse of an emerging middle class whose fortunes were not dependent on the church, the military, or landholding (p. 136). Whereas early in her period of study texts tended to be written by members of the elite, authors become decidedly less socially prominent over time, and the proportion of texts with anonymous authorship also increased. Merchants were prominent voices by the early eighteenth century; they wrote just 3 percent of texts in the period 1580 to 1589 and 31 percent in the period 1700 to 1720 (p. 142). The careers of prolific writers like Daniel Defoe, now known for his novels but who also published a torrent of works promoting trade and national development, are emblematic of ambitious authors making their way in the public sphere.
Erikson’s social network analysis shows that merchants occupied a marginal place in the network that tied individuals to state institutions through trade councils, which tended to be dominated by noblemen and professionals. Merchant authors served as brokers between sparsely connected individuals and more densely embedded communities of ownership. Erikson reveals how authorship knit individuals to companies. Time series regression models allow Erikson to test whether the number of chartered companies and levels of parliamentary representation of merchants are good predictors of the publication rate of economic texts in England and Scotland. Multivariate analyses that seek to control a host of political and economic factors bolster Erikson’s argument.
A final chapter explicitly comparing England to the Dutch case is especially revealing. Although England and the Dutch republic had much in common, the government of the latter was dominated by merchants, eliminating the incentives to appeal to government through the medium of the public sphere that Erikson finds decisive in the English case. Moreover, the Dutch founded far fewer companies than did their English competitors. Not only did England publish many more economic texts than did the Dutch, but after 1660 the ratio of economic texts to all other printed texts was also much greater in England. England’s lead in the development of economic thought was not simply an artifact of a leading economic position but rather a consequence of a lust for it. This surge in economic thought occurred although England did not overtake the Dutch in per capita GDP until the early nineteenth century.
Erikson’s book deserves to be influential in historical and comparative sociology and in social science history more broadly. It provides a compelling case for greater use of computational approaches in historical social sciences and for a new kind of sociology of knowledge propelled by a relational perspective. I hope that it is widely read and inspires more sociologists to make systematic use of network concepts and computational methods.