Melanie Meng Xue (LSE): British Industrialization and Cultural Change: Evidence from the Use of Proverbs
Abstract: This paper examines how industrialization transformed cultural values by analyzing changes in the historical usage of proverbs in printed texts from Great Britain between 1550 and 1900. Because proverbs reflect shared moral and social values, tracking their use over time allows us to measure patterns of cultural change. Drawing on historical proverb dictionaries, we classify proverbs into thematic dimensions in two ways: through targeted hypotheses, and through data-driven topics derived from unsupervised clustering. We then track their presence in books and newspapers over time. Using a panel dataset organized in 50-year intervals, we estimate how these proverb-based indicators of cultural attitudes shifted after 1750 in regions exposed to more intensive industrialization, focusing on dimensions such as punctuality, innovation, and individualism. We extend the analysis inductively by using the full set of clustered topics to examine additional patterns of cultural change and regional variation not covered by existing hypotheses. The paper contributes to research on cultural transformation during the Industrial Revolution and introduces a novel empirical framework for tracing long-run shifts in values and beliefs.
Economics
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