Saturated by Commerce: A Computational Analysis of Eighteenth-Century British Political Discourse

John Pocock, Istvan Hont, and scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment have profoundly shaped how historians understand eighteenth-century debates about commerce and ‘commercial society’. Their influential interpretations – ranging from republican anxieties about corruption to the political-economic dynamics of trade and state power – continue to frame the field. This paper takes these positions as analytical starting points and examines them computationally. Using the largest existing corpus of eighteenth-century printed publications, we extract and model large-scale linguistic patterns to test three hypotheses about the discursive relationship of commerce to other topics of political thought. Against the backdrop of overall ‘commercialisation’ of political thought taking place, the evidence aligns most strongly with Hont’s account of ‘jealousy of trade’, in which commerce is entwined with foreign rivalry and power-political concerns. Pocockian republican scepticism receives more limited support, and the broader Scottish Enlightenment narrative is only weakly reflected at scale. By situating early modern authors within these wider discursive structures, the paper demonstrates how computational methods can clarify, modify, and challenge established historiographical interpretations.