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 and how much we consume. Yet, concern with the morality of consumption is not new to capitalist societies and is present in much earlier discourses surrounding the market economy.

During the Restoration, England became a dominant economic and military power despite its religious and political crises. One of the main agents of England's significant economic expansion was the English East India Company (EIC). Authors at the end of the 17th century were concerned, however, with the negative impact of foreign trade. 

Building on the work of a related 2021 Data+ project, this team applied computational methods to digitized texts included in the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) to examine how early modern writers responded to these shifts in trade and consumption in their efforts to care for the “body politic.”

Caring for a Corrupt Corpus: England 1660-1714

Poster by Charlotte Lim, Ioana Lungescu, Dan Reznichenko, Heidi Smith and Amy Weng