Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism (2024-2025)
Since 2021, this project team has examined how Early Modern English pamphlets, sermons and meeting records reflected the discourse of commercial consumption and the labor sustaining global trade, particularly through the lens of the English Trading Companies. Using supervised machine learning techniques on archival texts, the team has explored premodern concepts of “ethical consumption” and market relationships. In 2024-2025, the focus shifted to analyzing how trading companies and allied ministers promoted the forced migration of indentured children to the New World and the proselytization of Native Americans, integrating natural language processing (NLP) and Geographic Information System (GIS) tools to connect textual analysis with demographic mapping.
In 2024-2025, the team concentrated on the Virginia Company of London records edited by Susan M. Kingsbury in 1906, which include meeting minutes, correspondence and financial statements from the early 1600s. Building on prior work, students identified documents relating to the forced migration of young indentured servants and investigated which company members shaped these policies. After conducting Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and cleaning the digitized records, the team learned historical context for Early Modern Virginia to guide analysis. Using NLP tools such as SpaCy for Named Entity Recognition (NER), they manually verified machine-labeled entities to track the attendance and influence of key decision-makers over time, producing visualizations of these findings.
The year concluded with a research trip to the University of Virginia’s early Virginia archives, complementing the group’s archival work at Duke. The resulting analyses and visualizations will contribute to an interactive map tracing the forced migration of “vagrant” children to the New World, designed as a public research aid. By combining computational text analysis, historical scholarship and geospatial visualization, the project provides a model for how digital humanities methods can deepen public understanding of the social and labor dynamics underpinning Early Modern global trade.
Timing
Summer 2024 - Spring 2025
Team Outputs
Visualization of company members' participation in meetings
See related Data+ summer project, Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism (2024), and earlier related team, Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism (2023-2024).
Map of land granted to the Virginia Company by the charter of 1609, according to the terms of the charter and current geographical knowledge, by anonymous cartographer, A History of the United States for Schools, 1919, public domain
