Was That Capitalism? a Culturomic Analysis of the English Language Area in 19th and 20th Century

This article tests whether the English language area may be adequately described as secularised and capitalist between 1800 and 2000. We are using the Google Ngram Viewer to chart and interpret time series plots of combined frequencies of pertinent keywords in the largest Internet book corpus, the Google Books corpus. The results suggest that the English language area is a secularised, politicised, scientificised, and ultimately also mediatised language area which has never been dominated by the economy. Thus, we turn social macro trend statements from assumptions into research questions and conclude that the sample period may not be characterised as capitalist if we associate capitalism with any form of over-average importance or even dominance of the economy.