The Politics of Consumption and England's Happiness in the Later Seventeenth Century
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9800233 |
|---|---|
| Authors | P Slack (University of Oxford, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 122 |
| Issue | 497 |
| Pages | 609-631 |
| Publication date | 2007-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The English Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/ehr/cem090 |
| OpenAlex | W2104109879 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 15 |
In 1677-8 two anonymous tracts – England's Great Happiness and A Discourse on the benefits of urban growth - forcefully defended economic consumption and social emulation as powerful motors of economic growth. They were the first publications of John Houghton and Nicholas Barbon, and they inaugurated the gradual ‘demoralization of luxury’ in English writings on political economy. This paper explores the circumstances of their publication, the intellectual resources on which they drew, and the trends of thought in Europe as well as England of which they were a part. It stresses the importance of the English political context in shaping their arguments and their reception down to 1700, and concludes that, despite continuing disagreement about the moral, political and economic issues involved, Houghton and Barbon and those sympathetic to their case had a tangible influence on contemporary thinking. By identifying consumer satisfaction with the advance of national well-being and collective happiness, they contributed to a new confidence in England's material progress and national content in the final decades of the seventeenth century
Archaeology · Consumption (sociology · Context (archaeology · Economic growth · Economics · Economy · Emulation · Happiness · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law
John Houghton and Medical Practice in London c. 1700
The politics of consumption as discursive space
Remaking the Drunkard in Early Stuart England
A Happier Man
Using Housing Quality to Track Change in the Standard of Living and Poverty for Seventeenth-Century London
Happiness in the Long Eighteenth Century
A Factory Afield
Happiness
Gardens of happiness
Instructive types’ or mere ‘fancies’
England’s Mercantilism
The Discovery of the Faustmann Formula in Natural Resource Economics
Material progress and the challenge of affluence in seventeenth-century England
Happiness and Projects between London and Vienna
Intoxicants and the invention of 'consumption
| Unique citing works | 15 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,88 |
| Citation span | 2009 - 2025 (17) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 14 |