Colin Wilder
I am a scholar of Digital History and German History. My focus is the history of ideas about freedom and law as well as printing and publishing in European history, especially seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Germany. For me Digital History involves the study, refinement, and application of digital methods such as “distant reading” to research questions within early modern history. My teaching at the University of South Carolina corresponds closely to this scholarly focus, as adapted to Departmental and student needs. Hence I teach courses principally on Digital history, German history, modern European history, the history of constitutionalism and republicanism, and the history of capitalism and business. I also perform professional service work at the Departmental, university, and national and international levels based on these specializations. I have held leadership positions in national and international professional academic enterprises related to both Digital and European history. (See bio and work also at https://sc.academia.edu/ColinWilder.)
Scholarship
My historical research involves a cluster of related problems in early modern history, specifically around liberalism and property law in early modern society. My work in Digital History in turn involves digital methods such as “distant reading”. I have published scholarship in Digital History and German History, in top-level academic venues, for over a decade. Specific contributions have been in empirical German history, the historical sociology of German law, historical bibliometrics, tools for computational text analysis, refinements of existing software methods for data cleaning and computer vision, and applications of some of these methods to history and archaeology. To date (Autumn 2024) I have produced 1 scholarly monograph (my book, https://brill.com/display/title/69265?language=en), 1 edited volume (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/N/bo99702271.html), 11 peer-reviewed journal or other scholarly articles and essays, 2 invited essays, 1 digital review, related software, and a partridge in a pear tree. I have essentially spent half of my time since 2010 studying, applying, and writing about digital methods, and the other half pursuing traditional interpretive empirical scholarship in early modern German / European legal and political thought.
Teaching
My teaching at USC corresponds to my scholarship of course, albeit adapted to Departmental and student needs. I have taught courses on Digital history, German history (HIST 338), modern European history (HIST 102), the history of constitutionalism and republicanism (HIST 467, 470), and the history of capitalism and business (HIST 370, 377, 778).
Within these I have developed a specialization in the history of business, political economy, capitalism, and monetary policy in the European and American contexts. This goes back to my pre-USC teaching experiences at the University of Chicago and Brown, where I taught courses like “Law, Liberty, and Property in European History”, “Prosperity and Poverty: The History, Politics, and Ethics of National Wealth”, and “The Emergence of Capitalism”. Building on my research into the history of European liberalism, I am now moving to adding to the Department’s Founding Documents (REACH Act) curriculum in constitutional history and the history of republicanism, both in the American founding era and especially in its British, continental European, and ancient roots. This begins with HIST 470: The History of American Constitutionalism. I have also developed a related course, HIST 467: The History of Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Europe, which explores similar themes in earlier periods – antiquity, Renaissance, and the Enlightenment.
Beginning in Summer 2025, under the aegis of the Artemis Project, I will be developing a series of extracurricular mini-seminars focused on great works from the history of classical liberal political thought, such as those Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Walter Bagehot, and Friedrich Hayek. These are intended to complement the USC courses mentioned above.
Supervisors: Constantin Fasolt, William Sewell, and Michael Geyer
Address: History Department
Gambrell Hall
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
Scholarship
My historical research involves a cluster of related problems in early modern history, specifically around liberalism and property law in early modern society. My work in Digital History in turn involves digital methods such as “distant reading”. I have published scholarship in Digital History and German History, in top-level academic venues, for over a decade. Specific contributions have been in empirical German history, the historical sociology of German law, historical bibliometrics, tools for computational text analysis, refinements of existing software methods for data cleaning and computer vision, and applications of some of these methods to history and archaeology. To date (Autumn 2024) I have produced 1 scholarly monograph (my book, https://brill.com/display/title/69265?language=en), 1 edited volume (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/N/bo99702271.html), 11 peer-reviewed journal or other scholarly articles and essays, 2 invited essays, 1 digital review, related software, and a partridge in a pear tree. I have essentially spent half of my time since 2010 studying, applying, and writing about digital methods, and the other half pursuing traditional interpretive empirical scholarship in early modern German / European legal and political thought.
Teaching
My teaching at USC corresponds to my scholarship of course, albeit adapted to Departmental and student needs. I have taught courses on Digital history, German history (HIST 338), modern European history (HIST 102), the history of constitutionalism and republicanism (HIST 467, 470), and the history of capitalism and business (HIST 370, 377, 778).
Within these I have developed a specialization in the history of business, political economy, capitalism, and monetary policy in the European and American contexts. This goes back to my pre-USC teaching experiences at the University of Chicago and Brown, where I taught courses like “Law, Liberty, and Property in European History”, “Prosperity and Poverty: The History, Politics, and Ethics of National Wealth”, and “The Emergence of Capitalism”. Building on my research into the history of European liberalism, I am now moving to adding to the Department’s Founding Documents (REACH Act) curriculum in constitutional history and the history of republicanism, both in the American founding era and especially in its British, continental European, and ancient roots. This begins with HIST 470: The History of American Constitutionalism. I have also developed a related course, HIST 467: The History of Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Europe, which explores similar themes in earlier periods – antiquity, Renaissance, and the Enlightenment.
Beginning in Summer 2025, under the aegis of the Artemis Project, I will be developing a series of extracurricular mini-seminars focused on great works from the history of classical liberal political thought, such as those Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Walter Bagehot, and Friedrich Hayek. These are intended to complement the USC courses mentioned above.
Supervisors: Constantin Fasolt, William Sewell, and Michael Geyer
Address: History Department
Gambrell Hall
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
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Books by Colin Wilder
314 pages | 90 color plates, 16 halftones, 90 figures, 8 tables, 8 graphs | 6 x 9 | © 2022
Articles, conference papers, reviews, talks by Colin Wilder
Project stages and themes:
I envision a multi-stage project which includes, to begin with, data acquisition; selection or adaptation of an appropriate metadata schema; creation of proper dataset; general surveys of collecting and library creation in the region; and analysis of the content of both individual collections and of library collecting in the region taken as a whole. Connecting to my present scholarship on legal history, I intend for the final stage of the project to be a detailed study of legal materials in these collections, including of course special legal collections such as those of law faculties. At the end, I expect to publish the metadata schemas and source code used in the project, should these prove useful to others.
Scope:
The period studied is ultimately very long – the early Reformation through the dissolution of many libraries in the Napoleonic Wars and aftermath. Catalog collections in the period usually changed slowly, albeit punctuated by sharp sudden changes e.g. the early Reformation or the wartime plunder of 1618-1648. To use a metaphor from physics, libraries may be thought of as constituting masses of intellectual capital, persisting over a long period and undergoing only slow change, with high inertia and strong gravitational pull toward them. They tend to change more slowly than regimes or even political boundaries, reflecting a kind of slow Braudelian spiritual development of a culture.
The geographical scope of the work is a region rather than an empire, a nation, a state, a city, or a single institution. In the course of earlier research for my doctoral thesis and monograph, I have seen in great detail how universities, other educational institutions, and lordly courts may be thought of as nodes in a network which professionals (e.g. jurists) and scholars (e.g. historians, archivists, antiquarians) traversed throughout their careers. That said, a degree of regionalism is also apparent in legal scholarship, with jurists using a combination of important national (imperial) historical materials and materials of local origin which reflect local events and customs.
The study focuses on the libraries of 13 institutions in 9 localities in the region. These include the Stadbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, the abbey of Fulda, the Adolphsuniversität Fulda, the University of Giessen, the Leih-Bibliothek zu Hanau, the Regierungsbibliothek Hanau, the Hohe Schule Herborn, the Lateinische Schule Herborn, the Gymnasium zu Hersfeld, the (Landes-) Bibliothek zu Kassel, the Hofschule zu Kassel, the Universitätsbibliothek Marburg, the Samthofgericht Marburg, a number of small collections in the many small Nassau lordships. Two large private collections in the region that would be ideal objects of study would be those of Zacharias Konrad von Uffenbach (40,000 works) and Johann Georg Estor (9,000 works).
There are a number of outliers which I have been collecting information on but which (at present) I do not intend to include in the study. These include the abbey of Lorsch (with its close ties to Fulda, but about 60 km south of Frankfurt) and the cathedral administration of Mainz (which though geographically proximate was almost invisible because Catholic). I also have data for a number of printers and book sellers in Frankfurt, Herborn, and Hersfeld, though at this time I do not foresee adding the study of the new book market to the project. The broader comparative field is of course scholarship on collecting and reading patterns across Germany or in other parts of Europe for the same period.
Law libraries excepted, the average library collection contains the usual mixture of belles lettres, histories, natural science, liturgy, Bibles, theology, law, legal deeds, and diet resolutions.
This theory makes several significant scholarly interventions. First, it attempts to reconcile outstanding semantic and social theories of legal change. Second, it historicizes legal pluralism, while giving evolutionary theory a healthy dose of contingency. Third, the four motifs should also be serviceable to intellectual historians as tools for describing how historical actors interact with traditions generally. Tradition need not be viewed as conservative or even overwhelmingly static. This paradigm may help historians and social scientists assess how the force of the status quo balances against the power of individuals to innovate.
314 pages | 90 color plates, 16 halftones, 90 figures, 8 tables, 8 graphs | 6 x 9 | © 2022
Project stages and themes:
I envision a multi-stage project which includes, to begin with, data acquisition; selection or adaptation of an appropriate metadata schema; creation of proper dataset; general surveys of collecting and library creation in the region; and analysis of the content of both individual collections and of library collecting in the region taken as a whole. Connecting to my present scholarship on legal history, I intend for the final stage of the project to be a detailed study of legal materials in these collections, including of course special legal collections such as those of law faculties. At the end, I expect to publish the metadata schemas and source code used in the project, should these prove useful to others.
Scope:
The period studied is ultimately very long – the early Reformation through the dissolution of many libraries in the Napoleonic Wars and aftermath. Catalog collections in the period usually changed slowly, albeit punctuated by sharp sudden changes e.g. the early Reformation or the wartime plunder of 1618-1648. To use a metaphor from physics, libraries may be thought of as constituting masses of intellectual capital, persisting over a long period and undergoing only slow change, with high inertia and strong gravitational pull toward them. They tend to change more slowly than regimes or even political boundaries, reflecting a kind of slow Braudelian spiritual development of a culture.
The geographical scope of the work is a region rather than an empire, a nation, a state, a city, or a single institution. In the course of earlier research for my doctoral thesis and monograph, I have seen in great detail how universities, other educational institutions, and lordly courts may be thought of as nodes in a network which professionals (e.g. jurists) and scholars (e.g. historians, archivists, antiquarians) traversed throughout their careers. That said, a degree of regionalism is also apparent in legal scholarship, with jurists using a combination of important national (imperial) historical materials and materials of local origin which reflect local events and customs.
The study focuses on the libraries of 13 institutions in 9 localities in the region. These include the Stadbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, the abbey of Fulda, the Adolphsuniversität Fulda, the University of Giessen, the Leih-Bibliothek zu Hanau, the Regierungsbibliothek Hanau, the Hohe Schule Herborn, the Lateinische Schule Herborn, the Gymnasium zu Hersfeld, the (Landes-) Bibliothek zu Kassel, the Hofschule zu Kassel, the Universitätsbibliothek Marburg, the Samthofgericht Marburg, a number of small collections in the many small Nassau lordships. Two large private collections in the region that would be ideal objects of study would be those of Zacharias Konrad von Uffenbach (40,000 works) and Johann Georg Estor (9,000 works).
There are a number of outliers which I have been collecting information on but which (at present) I do not intend to include in the study. These include the abbey of Lorsch (with its close ties to Fulda, but about 60 km south of Frankfurt) and the cathedral administration of Mainz (which though geographically proximate was almost invisible because Catholic). I also have data for a number of printers and book sellers in Frankfurt, Herborn, and Hersfeld, though at this time I do not foresee adding the study of the new book market to the project. The broader comparative field is of course scholarship on collecting and reading patterns across Germany or in other parts of Europe for the same period.
Law libraries excepted, the average library collection contains the usual mixture of belles lettres, histories, natural science, liturgy, Bibles, theology, law, legal deeds, and diet resolutions.
This theory makes several significant scholarly interventions. First, it attempts to reconcile outstanding semantic and social theories of legal change. Second, it historicizes legal pluralism, while giving evolutionary theory a healthy dose of contingency. Third, the four motifs should also be serviceable to intellectual historians as tools for describing how historical actors interact with traditions generally. Tradition need not be viewed as conservative or even overwhelmingly static. This paradigm may help historians and social scientists assess how the force of the status quo balances against the power of individuals to innovate.
Major themes of course
- Definitions of capitalism: There have been several competing definitions of capitalism. For example, is it the same as a currency-based economy, production for sale at market (rather than subsistence), industrialization, or a “modern” economy?
- Periodization of the emergence of capitalism: Historians, economists, and political thinkers disagree on when capitalism developed. For instance, did it emerge with the Industrial Revolution, transatlantic trade, the Italian Renaissance, or even earlier?
- Universality of capitalism: Is capitalism something that humans everywhere can and should practice, or is it somehow really only European?
- Power of capitalism: What has been the relationship between capitalism and power, especially military might?
- Science, technology, and capitalism: How has the development of capitalism been related to the growth of scientific knowledge, and to the development of specific military, productive, and transportation technologies?
There will also be some consideration of political economy and economic policy in this class. We will look at how they affect business activity. Historically, we will focus on the following: early white settlement; growth of business and finance; the Civil War period; the industrial revolution and scientific management; the populist era; the rise of big business and trusts; the progressive era and antitrust policy; the Roaring Twenties, Great Depression, New Deal and World War II; the post-War boom; the stagflation of the 1970’s; the long period of growth and bubble in the 1990’s and early 2000’s; and rise of the internet. We will consider the themes of changing business culture; labor vs. management; factors of economic growth; the role of technology in business; and the international context of American business.