Tracing and Classifying Social Frustrations: Computational Text Analysis of Social Problems in Early-Modern England (1475-1700)

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Abstract

This paper examines how authors in early modern England articulated social problems prior to the onset of industrialization and modernity. While scholarship has documented the profound economic, demographic, and institutional transformations occurring in Western Europe starting in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Weber 1927; Collins 1980; Wrigley 2016; Scott 1998), less is known about how people in pre-industrial societies understood the social challenges of their time. Using a corpus of approximately 60,000 English-language texts published between 1475 and 1700 (EEBO-TCP), this study investigates which social problems were most salient in early modern discourse, how those concerns evolved over two centuries, and whether they anticipated the macro-social changes commonly associated with modernity.

The project employs computational text analysis to identify and classify instances of social problems, defined as collectively oriented, negatively valenced, and potentially addressable phenomena. A two-dimensional typology distinguishes whether problems are framed as redistributive or growth-oriented, and whether their proposed solutions rely on existing means (present-oriented) or envision new technologies or institutional forms (future-oriented). The analysis proceeds in three stages: (1) unsupervised discovery of major topical domains using topic modeling; (2) supervised identification and classification of social frustrations within each topic relying on training models with human-in-the-loop annotation; and (3) historical interpretation of temporal trends across typological categories.

By tracing shifts in the prevalence and framing of social frustrations, this paper evaluates the extent to which early modern discourse contained proto-modern concerns (such as calls for institutional redesign, technological advancement, and large-scale social engineering) or whether grievances remained rooted primarily in redistributive and present-oriented frameworks. The findings contribute to sociological debates on the emergence of modernity by illuminating the pre-industrial genealogy of social problem construction and by clarifying how early modern societies conceptualized collective challenges on the eve of the transformations that would reshape the Western world.

Author

• Alejandro Abisambra Castillo, Northwestern University