Innovation under censorship: Effects on cultural production in early modern England

Abstract

• In early modern England, censorship permanently boosted cultural innovativeness. • Between 1525 and 1700, English censorship had a chilling effect on quantity, but only temporarily. • English cultural production was especially innovative in Tudor times and the Civil War era. • LLMs contain sufficient information to construct a historical index of censorship. • Cultural innovation and quantity can be measured using machine learning applied to early modern texts. The effects of print censorship on early modern England's cultural production have yet to be examined quantitatively. Doing so requires distilling dispersed qualitative information into numerical data. An annual index of print censorship is constructed by eliciting the historical knowledge encoded in a large language model (LLM) primed with evidence from secondary sources. Application of a machine-learning (ML) algorithm to a major corpus provides document-level measures of cultural innovativeness (quality) and volume (quantity). Pre-existing topic-model estimates apportion each document among distinct cultural themes—three affected by censorship and five unaffected. This yields a yearly theme-level panel for 1525–1700. Local projections estimate censorship's dynamic effects. Counterintuitively, censorship increases innovativeness in censorship-affected themes relative to non-affected themes. Censorship has a temporary chilling effect on the quantity of cultural production though output recovers within a decade. Results are robust to an instrumental-variable approach addressing the endogeneity of censorship. Findings are unchanged when the censorship index is constructed using three alternative LLMs. Leveraging LLMs and ML to measure hard-to-quantify phenomena, such as censorship and cultural production, illuminates the drivers of cultural evolution.