It can often seem that William Hogarth's famous Gin Lane (1751) says all that would ever need to be said about the “gin craze” of the early eighteenth century. The engraving has come to be virtually identified with its subject, revealing and circumscribing possible histories within its familiar lines. Yet, Gin Lane appeared at a determinate moment, chronologically marking the end of the gin craze and the culmination of one phase in the history of proletarian drinking. During this phase, as I will argue, there were significant changes in both the social conditions and relations that shaped laboring-class drinking and the ideas through which the propertied classes attempted to understand and control it. That this has not been argued before suggests how many historians have approached this phenomenon as a distinct social problem with fairly simple, basic features.

For Dorothy George, for example, gin drunkenness was the sort of social evil by which a civilization could be judged. She viewed the regulation of working-class drunkenness in 1751 as testament to the improving spirit of the eighteenth-century elites.Footnote 1 Much the same perspective pervades Lee Davison's recent contribution, which focuses on the legislation against the gin trade as a case study to examine the relative power of the social groups influencing the state. Davison attempts to determine why certain acts against the spirits trade failed and others succeeded. In the end, he concludes, the trade was regulated because of the extent of social disorder in 1751. The moral panic about lower-class manners persuaded the propertied classes that the needs of the social fabric should override the state's interest in preserving a trade that generated enormous revenue.Footnote 2

In addition to this state-centered work, excellent empirical research has exposed some of the myths about the gin craze. George Rudé effectively debunked the notion that the “Mother Gin” riots of 1736 were the actions of London's drink-fueled dregs. Rudé restored agency and determinacy to these rioters by illuminating the interweaving of the activities of Jacobite agitators, the nervous reactions of an insecure government, and the flaring up of a long-running industrial dispute.Footnote 3 Peter Clark's work remains the only attempt to illuminate the social and economic realities of the gin trade and their connection to the debates over laboring-class gin drinking. Clark gives some sense of the scale of gin production and consumption in the early eighteenth century, suggesting that the fears of contemporary reformers were deeply exaggerated.Footnote 4 Moreover, Jessica Warner has argued that we can see important parallels between the stereotypes deployed in the gin debates and the contemporary representation of drug addicts, in particular of heroin-addicted mothers in New York City.Footnote 5

I want to emphasize two features of this historiography. First, most historians approaching this subject have relied on a basic stock of seemingly constant images and themes. Second, historians have not analyzed the gin trade as a part of the whole history of eighteenth-century social, economic, and intellectual change. This article has a threefold aim. It argues that systematic attention to ideas reveals significant changes in the representation of gin and its drinkers in the first half of the eighteenth century. Second, it insists that these changes are only comprehensible, and their historical significance apparent, when dissolved back into the changing totality of social forces and relations, of which they form the intellectual expression. Finally, it suggests that it is only through such an approach that the particular and enduring importance of the gin craze, and the ideas to which it gave rise, can really emerge.

During the early eighteenth century, the particular balance between the emerging forces of capitalist development and the residual forms of precapitalist societies meant that the gin debates were shaped by a profound anxiety about many of the manifestations of commercial development. Laboring-class gin drinking was discussed in terms of a complex set of concepts, betraying unease with the size of the urban proletariat, the nature of London society, and the spread of luxury. By midcentury, capitalist accumulation and networks of commercial exchange had developed to the point where the phenomenon of laboring-class drunkenness became ideologically detached from the sense of societal sickness, becoming reconfigured instead as a determinate and delimited social problem: a specific issue that required reform. This transformation makes sense within a society increasingly based on relations of commercial exchange, generated by the seemingly creative and progressive force of desires. The gin debates saw both the formation of a set of concepts for demarcating and stigmatizing drink in general and the elaboration of concepts of addiction that expressed the particular plight of the most abject proletarians in London society: working-class women. The concept of addiction, I suggest, developed as a partial expression of the increasing alienation within urban society, shaping urban drink culture particularly among working-class women.Footnote 6

The article is based on the debates over two major pieces of legislation, those of 1736 and 1751, both of which attempted, with varying degrees of success, to regulate the spirits trade.Footnote 7 In considering each moment, I focus on a few pamphlets, prints, and poems, closely examining their ideas in relation to the balance of political, social, and economic forces. Throughout the article, I make use of the terms “progressive” and “conservative” as analytical categories arising from the objective forces driving social developments at any one moment. Yet they are also empirical categories derived from the subjective perceptions of historical actors—their own apprehensions, however partial and incomplete, of their position in relation to the deepest contemporary tendencies.

The history of the spirits trade forms an integral part of the development of the early eighteenth-century mercantilist state. The period 1700–36 saw the continued expansion of British overseas trade, which consolidated the power of the mercantile and financial classes. Ideologically, these sections of propertied society were progressive insofar as they identified the wealth and refinement of the nation with the development of foreign trade, the export of domestic manufactures, and the growing sophistication of the instruments of financial transactions. Sir Robert Walpole's state existed, in part at least, to enable the untroubled conduct of a commercial society so conceptualized. Yet the capacity of these classes and their advocates to identify the deepest tendencies driving economic and social change was limited when it came to domestic commerce. Only a few commercial writers could view the proliferating domestic trade of the period, feeding the tastes and increasing the wealth of the middling classes, with unambiguous approbation. Exotic cotton clothing, toys, tea, sugar, and, most pertinent to this essay, foreign spirits began to enter the nation in ever greater quantities, nourishing the branches of domestic commerce as they did so. The spirits trade was a startling example of this process.

Originally forged out of middling families' tastes for sweetened French and Dutch brandies, the growing market for spirits was soon supplied by a domestic industry peddling brandies, rum, and gin, the latter distilled from farmers' surplus grain. By the 1720s, the distillers had become a powerful economic interest that embraced West India merchants, farmers, and the large numbers of petty tradesmen and merchants who retailed spirits across the nation. More important, the state, politically eager to lighten the taxes on the landed classes, saw the spirits trade as easy money. By 1730, one-quarter of all government taxation came from the drinks trade, mostly in excises.Footnote 8 But many commercial writers could not be reconciled to spirits consumption, even after the development of domestic production, because of its diffusion into the British laboring classes. By the middle of the 1720s, a taste for spirits had developed among sections of London's laboring classes.

London possessed a large and growing proletariat, swelled by constant migration from the city's hinterlands. As well as being prone to the endemic diseases of the city, these young people, the majority of them women, brought with them cultural norms and expectations that, when fused with the conditions of urban wage labor, appeared unruly and threatening to their employers. Changing property and sex relations in the countryside may have driven these men and women into urban wage labor, but they did not erase this culture. Practices of gifting, extravagant social expenditure, and leisure-oriented work patterns would perpetuate, in slowly changing forms, throughout the gradual transition from the peasant-based society in which they had originally been forged. Drink had always played an important part in this culture.Footnote 9 Since the metropolitan beer trade was tightly regulated and highly taxed, a market existed for cheap inebriating drink, which the expanding spirits industry gladly provided. Production and retailing of gin expanded into the eastern and southern suburbs of the city, where London's manufacturers and servants were concentrated. Gin shops proliferated in these parishes, where, it was noted, the wives of artisans and female servants could resort during the day without the disapprobation they would attract in the alehouses.Footnote 10 To these workers, binge drinking fulfilled the expectations of a culture that maintained strong residual ties to norms of social expenditure. To their employers and to the state, ever more estranged from such norms, laboring-class drinking appeared to be yet another instance of their inveterate idleness. More worryingly, it also appeared to be another example of fashionable luxury diffusing through the social order.

The propertied classes could generally agree on the need to reform the manners of the poor. Only a few of the most progressive of commercial writers considered plebeian desires as anything more than unruly appetites detracting from labor effort. Daniel Defoe was unusual in arguing that domestic commerce, fed by laboring-class consumption, was economically and socially useful. But even he could see it as little more than a happy Mandevillian paradox, an example of irrational private habits and desires functioned for the public good.Footnote 11 The agents of the state and the overseas merchants could both see an interest in a large, healthy, and sober population from which the fiscal-military state could draw its manpower. In addition, an unnerved Whig government was happy to see some regulation that would marry its fiscal interests with its interest in preserving a social order that seemed extremely fragile when placed against the ever-present Jacobite threat. Consequently, there was broad support for some measure to restrain laboring-class gin drinking.Footnote 12

By 1729, the problem was sufficiently serious to arouse the concern of London's two benches of justices and certain sections of the metropolitan middling sorts. In 1729, an act was passed to place a duty of 5s. a gallon on all spirits, demand a £20 license for retailing spirits, and issue £10 fines for hawking gin in the streets. This was the culmination of a campaign by the Middlesex bench, the Royal College of Physicians, and the Middlesex grand jurymen. Scrupulously avoiding any tax on distilling, this act testified to the lobbying power of the Distillers Company and the growing importance of the drinks trade to land and government revenue alike. Widespread evasion of the law led to its repeal in 1733, and gin production steadily continued to rise. In 1736, a new and more impressive coalition of reformers began to campaign against the gin trade. It was again centered on crucial Middlesex justices like Nathaniel Blackerby and Thomas Lane and the Westminster justice Sir John Gonson, whose Charges to the Grand Jury of 1728 had formed an important part of the campaign for the earlier act.Footnote 13 This time, petitions came from sections of the urban middling people: presentments against the growth of the gin trade included ones from the grand juries of Middlesex and Tower Hamlets. Vital additional activism and lobbying power came in the form of the moral reformers of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and Georgia Colony. These ecumenical organizations brought together those of progressive and conservative tendencies alike, connecting the urban magistracy with the campaign for the reformation of manners and the House of Commons.Footnote 14

In 1735, the grand jury of the City of London presented to “complain of the late surprising Increase of Gin Shops and other Retailers of Distilled Spirituous Liquors.” Drawing on the petition of the College of Physicians from 1725, they outlined the effects of gin on the bodies of the inferior sort. “To this practice,” they claimed, “is chiefly owing that our lower Kind of People are enfeebled and disabled, having neither the Will nor Power to Labor for an honest Livelihood.” Similarly, the grand jury of the County of Middlesex reported that because gin was sold so cheaply, “the meaner, though useful Part of the Nation, as Day-Laborers, Men and Women Servants and Common Soldiers, nay even Children are enticed and seduced to taste, like and approve” of these liquors, “whereby they are intoxicated and get Drunk and are frequently seen in our Streets in such a Condition abhorrent to reasonable creatures.” Like the county's grand jurymen, they emphasized that “many are thereby rendered useless to themselves as well as the Community.”Footnote 15 Gin, it was argued, excited the poor to social disorder, made them incapable of labor, and eventually ended their lives prematurely. With pressure growing among the London justices, and with the sponsorship of the moral reformers, a bill was introduced into Parliament, under the guidance of Joseph Jekyll. The bill proposed placing domestic gin under the jurisdiction of the Excise and charging high fees for the issuing of licenses to sell spirits.Footnote 16

But this bill also ranged important social forces against reform. The state's interest in revenue led it to hedge its advocacy of Jekyll's bill, seeking to protect the distillers from direct taxation and concentrating instead on licensing retailers and placing excises on possession.Footnote 17 Even this was insufficient to appease farmers who considered that a vital outlet for their grain was being threatened. And the likely effects of the proposed bill on those tradesmen who retailed spirits meant that broad swathes of the metropolitan middling sorts were driven into another coalition with the landed classes and their parliamentary representatives. Middling tradesmen had plenty of reasons to feel that the state was in the hands of a clique of financiers who profited from speculation, which hurt traders' credit, and higher taxation, which increasingly fell on their commerce. For the landed interest, whose mostly Tory representatives were excluded from political power, and whose social preeminence was challenged regularly by Whig grandees and new wealth in the city, the frustrations of middling tradesmen were a force to be harnessed. An essentially conservative interest could, at times, enter into coalition with the classes representing some of the period's most progressive tendencies. In social terms, this could be seen in the provincial gentry's collusion with smugglers, “blacks,” or excise rioters. In the political sphere it produced Lord Bolingbroke and William Pulteney's “country” opposition of the 1730s.Footnote 18 Once it became clear that Walpole's government intended to make spirits a milk cow for the state, the gin bill became socially divisive and politically contentious.

A close examination of the pamphlet literature inspired by the bill on both sides reveals a profound ideological crisis. Within these discourses on urban gin drinking, we can detect not only the proximate political and social determination of the debates but a developing consciousness of the social processes of estrangement and alienation, projected into the sphere of bourgeois social thought. As well as wrestling to shape the legislation around the gin trade, these commentators were struggling to comprehend the place of commerce and the position of laboring people in society. In doing so, they were also struggling to comprehend the relationships between private desires and public good and between moral reform and economic utility. These more abstract concerns signified the ongoing development of intellectual estrangement, of alienation at the level of thought, expressing on this plane the estrangement that lay at the heart of developing capitalist relations in English society, particularly in London. Knowledge, like society, appeared increasingly fragmented, yet not to the extent that these realms could be unproblematically separated out, experienced as distinct entities. The experience of this ideological crisis was common across the range of social forces present in these debates and ramified the representation of laboring-class agency as expressed in the form of gin drinking.

The first pamphlet that I will examine was written anonymously, possibly by a churchman, definitely by someone sympathetic to the industrial and merchant interests. Accordingly, The Trial of the Spirits represents an attempt to argue for reform within the terms of contemporary mercantilist discourse. “The Strength and Riches of a National Community,” the author argued, “consist in the health and Numerousness of its Laborers.” “If these be not preserv'd,” he asked, “where will you find Soldiers? How will the culture of your lands, the useful manufactures and Merchandize of the Nation be carried on?”Footnote 19 The gin trade was not a species of luxury or a vicious industry, so much as a useless nuisance. In a thoroughly Mandevillian passage, he maintained, “I cannot but allow that Mankind in a trading nation especially, lives upon the Vices and Extravagancies of one another.” But there had to be limits placed on those who produced the wealth of the nation: “No body of men ought to get estates at the expense of the Poor” less because it was wrong, than for the reason that “that very Expense disables them from being Serviceable to the Community.”Footnote 20

The gin trade, as it conflicted with the military and economic capabilities of a trading nation, was considered useless and harmful. The problem lay primarily with the drink's cheapness. For “Gin is sold very cheap, so that People may get muddled with it for three half pence and for three pence made quite Drunk even to Madness,” so that “it comes within the power of Common People to purchase the hopeful Reputation of getting drunk at a very small Expense.”Footnote 21 In describing how gin operated on its drinkers, this author used the most advanced contemporary physiological and psychological arguments. In a manner reminiscent of Bernard Mandeville's arguments about the problems of educating the lower orders, this author argued that gin unleashed passions that reduced the capacity to labor.Footnote 22 People drunk on gin forgot to pay their debts, leaving their families in want and poverty. They were inspired with “a false courage or Mock-Heroism,” and, for as long as this lasted, “His majesty's Peace must be broken” and the neighborhood disturbed. When the money ran out, these people were compelled to obtain more, regardless of the means: “Hence follow desperate Attacks, Highway and street Robberies, attended sometimes with the most Cruel and unheard of Murthers.” For these people, “the Fear of House of Correction, Imprisonment or the Gallows make little impression on them, if any at all.” But, as with Mandeville's arguments on education, it was not that there was anything inherently bad about such self-delusion. It was rather that it disabled people for useful labor. For, “the Fury at length being over, the hero subsides in proportion and sinks into a miserable invalid, his whole Strength and Courage being entirely demolished.” Conscious suddenly of the misfit between their aspirations and the realities of their lives, he suggested, these drinkers sank into melancholy, initiating a train of diseases that left the laboring man “so stupid and enervated, that instead of being a useful member of the Community, he is actually become a scandalous burthen to it.”Footnote 23

It was a measure of the author's economic progressivism that he extended his argument to address the potential utility of the appetites of the poor. In an attempt to allay the fears of farmers and landlords, he deployed medical theory and political arithmetic to demonstrate that gin drinkers ate less bread, so that what farmers gained on one hand, they lost on the other. Thus, the distillery was “extremely hurtful to the landed interest.”Footnote 24 Adam Holden wrote a defense of the Trial, in which he fleshed out the nature of laboring people's consumption. Here we can see how current ideas that stressed the laboring classes' function as producers of the nation's wealth placed severe limits on contemporaries' capacity to envisage them as consumers. They were, Holden claimed, a different sort of people to those with property, and their utility had to be assessed on this basis. “Lay but the Temptation before these Sort of People,” he argued, “and all the Laws in being or that can be made consonant with the natural Right of the Subject can never prevent ‘em from being drunk.” The task was, therefore, to raise the price of spirits so that they would be forced to return to their “natural taste of bread, meat and beer” and the consumption of these underdeveloped people would become socially beneficial again.Footnote 25 Like Mandeville, these authors suggested that it was unwise to allow the appetites and wants of the laboring classes to develop in the same way as had those of the propertied elites. Paradoxically, it would best suit a prosperous commercial society if they remained in a state of semidevelopment, subservient to civilized wage labor but confined to primitive appetites.

In arguing that the maintenance of wage labor was of primary importance, necessitating the control of workers' patterns of consumption, these writers recognized the growing relations of social alienation in London. They characterized the laboring classes' desire for gin as a new want, aroused by the capacity of the drink to fire the imaginations of its consumers. In doing so, they made it no different in form and operation to the range of wants that were deemed to be socially useful. But the same utilitarian logic proscribed this modern form of consumption for the poor. The unregulated expansion of the laboring population's desires was seen as irreconcilable with the creation of wealth in a trading nation. The laboring classes would not work unless they were compelled to. To develop their tastes and expand their wants undermined the forces compelling them to engage in demoralizing wage labor. Just as estrangement was recognized as it shaped social relations in the city, so it was manifested in the logic of these authors' arguments. In extending their Mandevillian vision across all spheres of the social world, they bracketed off questions of virtue as increasingly irrelevant for questions of policy. Policy had to be guided by economic utility, without reference to the virtue of traditional social relations. Estranged social relations increasingly infused both the form and content of these ideological positions.

We can see this process from the other side of the debate. The terms that Thomas Wilson used to attack the spirits trade in his Distilled Spirituous Liquors the Bane of the Nation seem to be absolutely different from those of the Trial. Moreover, the two representations of gin and its drinkers appear, at first, to be irreconcilable. Yet Wilson's analysis, while highly conservative in orientation, also had to be intelligible to the broad public it addressed if it were to be hegemonic. In addressing questions of economic policy, and the subjective effects of the drink on its consumers, Wilson thus turned to progressive ideas and sciences. He was compelled to endorse and reproduce the processes of alienation and fragmentation in social and intellectual life that he ostensibly deplored.

Wilson's pamphlet abounds with attacks on the processes of luxury and decay rife within the social metabolism. For Wilson, the spirits industry represented “an upstart Trade, introduc'd upon the Luxury and Depravity of the Age.” To defend the spirits trade was to defend a private interest against the public good, to endorse the spread of vice throughout the social order. In the southeastern counties, for example, the taste for gin had spread from farmers to their servants in husbandry, who “love to imitate their betters.” But, most notoriously, it fueled the turbulent social relations of the metropolis. Here, the taste for spirits spread like a disease. “Is it not notorious,” he demanded, “that Luxury and Extravagance were never at a greater height than at present, amongst the laborious and even the meanest part of Mankind?” This most valuable part of the nation was, consequently, “intoxicated and enervated by a fatal love of a slow but sure Poyson.”Footnote 26

For Wilson, the gin shops that proliferated in London's poorer parishes acted as conduits of this fatal luxury, wherein inversions of the social order were daily staged. “I am informed,” Wilson claimed, “in one place not far from Smithfield … a Trader has a large empty room backward, where as his wretched guests get intoxicated, they are laid together in Heaps, promiscuously, Men, Women and Children, until they recover their senses,” whereupon “they either proceed to drink on, or having spent all the time they have, go out for find wherewithal to return to the same dreadful pursuit.” And, he continued, “how they procure more money for this Purpose, many of them, the Sessions-Paper too often acquaints us.”Footnote 27 For Wilson, it was the nature of the city, with its manifold temptations, playing on the same primitive tastes and simple natures that the author of the Trial attempted to preserve, that created the disastrous taste for gin and the “Deluge of Vice and Immorality” that followed in its wake.Footnote 28

But Wilson's conceptual armory of civic humanism and Protestant reform, his lexicon of virtue and vice, was necessarily buttressed by a recognition that the gin trade had an economic logic to it. More particularly, this economic logic was clear to the conservative landed classes to whom he appealed. Consequently, while he argued that the taste for gin was an instance of the “general Depravity of the lower Class of People,” he also had to address the counterargument that the lower-class taste for gin was increasing the wealth and power of the landed classes and, therefore, of society.Footnote 29 Like the author of the Trial, then, he had to take on the Mandevillian argument that private vices led to public benefits and argue within its terms.

Reform was not simply a question of vice and immorality, Wilson insisted, but one of utility for a trading nation. The “Strength and Riches of every Country,” the “Laborious Hands,” were being frittered away in the gin shops.Footnote 30 Marshaling medical knowledge from the works of George Cheyne and Stephen Hales, he urged that future generations were being destroyed, physically, in the wombs of gin-drinking women. Thousands brought on “various Diseases that carry them off, if not suddenly, yet in the End, as certainly as if they had been stabb'd through the heart.” Those children that survived would only “drag on a miserable Life, a burthen to themselves and a load to their Country.”Footnote 31

The laboring people were not simply registered as burdensome through their inability to labor. Like the author of the Trial, Wilson, to a limited extent, saw laborers' consumption as possessing economic value. Again deploying the most advanced medical knowledge and making extensive use of political arithmetic, he argued that “as the demand for and Consumption of spirits increases … the Stomachs of more People will be lost.” London, then, was not simply a den of vice but, to some extent, a source of useful appetites, the “Great Stomach of the Nation.” If this appetite be vitiated and lost, “even the most Distant Members” of the social body “will find a Sensible Decay.”Footnote 32

Finally, Wilson had to account for the laboring classes' apparent desire for something that was so patently bad for them and the nation. If it was too much to expect for people of such limited capacities to reform themselves for the nation, what made them want to drink this deadly liquid? Again, turning to the work of the highly progressive Hales, Wilson argued that gin operated in a peculiar manner on the human subject, perverting desires and diverting them from their proper outlets. Gin, he claimed, generated delusory feelings of warmth and comfort through the blood and the stomach. When it wore off, drinkers, craving more, turned once more to the drink, without understanding that they were destroying their own capacity for true pleasure by eroding their capacity for rational discrimination.Footnote 33 As Hales argued, “when a man's will and affections are thus depraved … and he is delighted with this worst of slavery, there are but little hopes of him.” To save such a man, “he must be, as it were, forced into his Liberty and rescued, in some measure, from his own inordinate Desires.”Footnote 34

So, Wilson's pamphlet was an attempt to link gin drinking to the range of examples that conservatives of the early eighteenth century saw as instances of luxury destroying the virtue embedded within the social order. Yet to make his argument compelling, Wilson had not only to address the Mandevillian arguments of mercantilist advocates of the trade but to convince the landed classes that the spirits trade was not, in fact, in their interests and that the gin drinker was useless, both as a laborer and as a consumer. In doing so, Wilson recognized the need for and increasing dominance of arguments with an “economic” logic. He allowed for the possibility that the laboring classes might possess some useful desires in trading nations and that their desire for gin, if it were to be differentiated from useful desires, needed to be explained with reference to concepts of rational intention. Such concepts implied that the laboring classes might not in fact be primitive and inclined to vice and depravity, that they might be endowed with the same capacities as the propertied Englishman. A subjectively conservative tract contained within it a recognition of the instability of conservative ideas, the necessity of some accommodation with the forces of economic and social development, and the complex position of desire in human subjectivity.

These paradoxes and reversals were reproduced in a different form by those writers who sought to defend the gin trade. As the debates in Parliament revealed to many members that the government's interest in the reform of the gin trade might be more pecuniary than virtuous, Jekyll's bill offered an opportunity for the opposition to mobilize its coalition of country Whigs and Tory gentry. Outside Parliament, the coalition represented a growing alliance of the urban retailing and distilling interests with the farming interests and some West India merchants. Pamphleteers and prominent opposition politicians began to argue that the bill, in its current form at least, was an attempt to destroy a useful trade and a hypocritical attack on the drinking habits of the poor. The anonymous author of a pamphlet opposing the act argued that while all could see the need to regulate the spirits industry and to confine the drinking of the poor, the very criteria that reformers used—the effects on industriousness and on the wealth of the nation—could make a case for utility of the drinks trade. Deploying the same progressive technologies of political arithmetic so lovingly used by reformers, this author calculated that there were “near 100,000 families now in this kingdom, who owe the whole or chief part of their support to the manufacture and sale of such liquors.” It made no practical sense, therefore, to destroy “so valuable a trade.”Footnote 35

More radically, the leading opposition representative of the country Whigs, William Pulteney, argued a political case for the maintenance of the trade. The poor might be guilty of “immoderate drinking,” he admitted, but the current bill was an infringement of natural justice. By this act, he claimed, “a poor journeyman or laborer shall not have a dram, shall not have a glass of punch until he can spare to lay out 8 or 10s. at a time, which I am sure Two Thirds of our People cannot well spare to do,” whereas a rich man could “commit as many debauches as he liked.”Footnote 36 Yet, even Pulteney could not avoid the economic logic of national utility. In a pamphlet taking the form of a letter from an M.P. to his “Friend in the Country,” Pulteney asked whether it was not the case that “a proper Degree of the consumption of rum, sugar and our own spirits” might be “not only Right but beneficial to the nation?”Footnote 37

Pulteney's position accorded the laboring people a political right and economic license to drink gin, but it gave little idea of how one might preserve regulation or address the patent fact that the poor could be observed constantly drinking to excess. The same problem confronted more conservative defenses of the gin trade. These country Tory writings, like their country Whig counterparts, combined the economic logic of utility with an assertion of political entitlement, which was hard to maintain without contemplating the wholly unpalatable conclusion that the poor should be allowed to drink to excess without restraint. Bolingbroke and the Tory writers made much of the government's hypocrisy in attacking the drunkenness of the poor. “I'll warrant you it will be thought a mighty crime for a laboring man to take a cheerful glass his own way,” exclaimed a “Man of Kent” in the daily papers, “whereas of course, it would be a harmless thing to be drunk on French Claret and spend the rent of two or three acres of land for an evening's Diversions of your Italian geldings.” A paternalistic Parliament, as opposed to one driven by lucre and private ambition, would allow people to have “a reasonable use of that commodity.”Footnote 38

This was, of course, a position fraught with difficulty. The references to the laboring people drinking “constantly and excessively” or even, in a more positive light, “in their own way” reveal that these paternalists and political advocates of the poor regarded them as irrational and underdeveloped consumers. Was it plausible to imagine them being reformed simply by raising the price of spirits? How could such people be self-governing political subjects? How could a truly paternalistic farmer or landlord endorse excessive drinking in the knowledge that he stood to gain materially from the prosperity of the spirits trade? That contemporaries were conscious of these contradictions becomes even more clear with reference to the satirical literature produced in these debates.

The gin act of 1736 produced a large number of prints and poems by Grub Street hacks, who were overwhelmingly hostile to Walpole's ministry. Prints and poems proliferated with satirical references and comic inversions. Formally, the poems demonstrate the familiar burlesque, mock forms of Augustan satirical literature. Their content also displays well-known images mocking the hypocrisy and venality of the government. Yet, as with the best of such literature, the satire frequently swings both ways, displaying the self-conscious recognition that positions based on virtue are impossible. The great ones might be vicious and oppressive, but the nostalgic yearnings of the “country” are as hypocritical as the pious rhetoric of the government reformer. In this way, gin became a metaphor for the sickness of a society caught in seemingly irresolvable contradictions.

We can see this more clearly with reference to one of the most accomplished of the satirical verses of 1736, An Elegy on the Much Lamented Death of the Most Excellent, the Most Truly-Beloved and Universally Admired Lady, Madam Gineva. Footnote 39 This mock elegy enacts a satire that refers in part to a tradition of wine and ale poems. But while wine was a burlesque drink that permitted inferiors to imagine themselves kings, the qualities of gin and its socioeconomic status demanded a more astringent and much darker satire. There is the familiar condemnation of oppressive governors:

Yet if virtue and nobility are masks for oppression and exploitation, then the nostalgic politics of the country are equally delusory. The poet continues in an equally bitter vein:

And the satire extends into a mockery of the Golden Age of liberty, where

Gin functions as the metaphor of universal corruption and vice, throwing all certainties into drunken instability; this condition is followed, inevitably, by a period of intense melancholy. Yet in this poem, gin also offers the only balm for the experience of such painful contradictions. Gin, the product of an exploitative and self-destructive society, is its own medicine, obscuring the painful truth with its delusory comforts. Gin is the solution to the problem of overpopulation for parishes anxious to keep their rates low, for it kills children in the womb and makes men impotent. And, perhaps the worst crime of the reformers, the poet claimed, is to deprive the poor of their only solace:

Can it be called an act of public good, he asks,

The image of gin as an anesthetic against poverty and exploitation recurs throughout the satirical literature, where it features as their “chief pleasure,” the “cheap cordial for the Poor's relief.”Footnote 42 To remove this, the satirists urged the ministry, was to inflame the fury of the dispossessed. To a ministry made nervous by rumors of Jacobite plots and by riots across East London and the west of England, this was not to be taken lightly.

These satires also highlighted a significant aspect of the culture within which laboring-class Londoners drank gin. The political pamphleteers, whether advocating reform or not, all recognized that the laboring classes' drink culture was shaped by values and norms that these writers did not themselves share. To the writers it appeared as excess or as the simple habits of an uncivilized and unrefined people. The satirical productions were able, through their use of comic modes, to capture something of the carnivalesque sociability that informed laborers' drink culture. They also captured the changing function of these values and practices in the city's developing capitalist social relations. The carnivalesque imagery and comic inversions are deeply melancholic; they enact a dark and humorless laughter fueled by a commodity that made substantial profits for the landed and trading classes. These hack writers demonstrated a partial consciousness that the city's laboring people were being destroyed and their culture travestied by the relations of wage labor. Laborers' only outlet was to direct the residues of their autonomous culture into the dubious compensations of a commodity that destroyed their own health and increased others' wealth. Just as the satirists exposed the alienation of virtue from social and intellectual life, so they also partially revealed the estrangement of the urban laboring classes.

In the 1730s, the issue of laboring-class gin drinking, like that of laboring-class consumption more generally, was bound up with the concerns animating debates about luxury and, more broadly, with the historical emergence of “the economic” as a separate sphere of knowledge and social practice. How free should the passions be? While they created amazing opulence, the commerce they inspired contradicted many traditional legitimations of the social order. What was the status of justice and virtue, if these concepts could, in theory, be explained as effects of desire-driven economic practice? Gin came to stand as a metaphor for contradiction and paradox, as part of a more general crisis within early capitalist ideology caused by the increasing obsolescence of ideologies forged for an earlier stage of capitalist development. By the 1750s, as the next section explores, this particular ideological crisis had been largely resolved. Capitalist ideology produced concepts that made the new conditions of the midcentury intelligible, supplanting the ideologies of the early eighteenth century.

One way of tracing the shifting conditions and ideology of the 1730s to the 1750s is to examine the fate of the gin act of 1736. The contradictory coalition of the conservative landed opposition and the urban trading classes may have failed to prevent the act from passing, but it soon rendered it unenforceable. In the name of liberty, acts of civil disorder against justices and excisemen were orchestrated by the London middling sorts and legitimated by the parliamentary opposition. By 1740, the act was totally dead. In 1743, it was repealed in favor of far more lenient legislation.Footnote 43 Politically, this can be seen as part of the demise of the Walpolean objective of appeasing the landed classes at the expense of trade, itself an expression of the increased social and political status of the commercial middling sorts in the social and economic order. This episode was also intimately bound up with the further commercialization of the British economy and the increased accumulation of capital. In the case of the gin trade, the spirits trade reached its eighteenth-century peak in the late 1740s.Footnote 44

By the 1750s, land had also expanded its commercial links. The interdependence of land and commerce can be registered in the large-scale redirection of grain into the lucrative export trade (which reached its peak in the 1750s) and in the increasing immersion of farmers in the world of credit and finance, tying them into expanding capital markets in order to improve their land.Footnote 45 Ideologically, this change was expressed in the frequent observation that land was just another species of commerce, indistinguishable from any other branch of trade.Footnote 46 If the landed classes had now become a recognizable commercial interest, the traders who fed domestic demand were also enjoying a higher social and cultural status. Contemporary paeans to commerce as the “strength of the nation” pointedly included the domestic trade and even its laboring-class markets. The War of the Austrian Succession had closed off many markets for British manufactures against the background of an all-too-evident resurgence in French commerce. As the French appeared to threaten Britain's position in both traditional textile markets and new luxury trades, the war made it clear to many commercial writers just how important domestic markets had become.Footnote 47

Thus, by the 1750s, the laboring classes' consumer desires, their appetites and wants, enjoyed a remarkably enhanced economic and social position in capitalist ideology. Mercantile writers spoke of increasing the consumption of British manufactures, developing the laboring classes' taste for clothing and manufactured domestic furnishings, and refining their manners in the process. The most progressive writers of this period, identifying commerce as the motor of economic, social, and moral improvement, aimed to expand the reach of these improving forces across the nation and across the world, including even the laboring poor in their vision of universal progress.Footnote 48

These writers drew, to some extent, on what they saw around them. Sections of the urban laboring classes appeared to conform to bourgeois notions of industrious labor, thrifty accumulation, and judicious, respectable consumption. In London, for example, workers began to take fewer holidays and gradually detach themselves from customary work patterns. Significant sections were also consuming commodities associated with middling-sort ideas of respectable and decent consumption. Tea and its accoutrements, a higher standard of interior furnishing and decoration, and fashionable cotton clothing were regular features of urban laboring-class life.Footnote 49 Yet there were definite limits to this accommodation. The power of laboring people as consumers was materially limited by their position within capitalist production. The imperatives of poverty and labor limited the assimilation of middling-sort ideals. Consequently, laboring people remained residually tied to the customary norms that shaped urban community relations and to petty credit networks that played a vital role in keeping poor families afloat.Footnote 50

This conjunction highlighted a contradiction in progressive expectations for the poor. The laboring classes were distinguished by the same feature that progressive thinkers used to include them in the vision of commercial progress: their property in and exchange of labor. This enabled progressive writers to see the laboring classes as assimilable to respectable society, making them rational agents engaged in refining commerce to secure their wants. Writers described labor as the “poor man's commodity” or “a commodity like any other.”Footnote 51 Yet the societal need for labor over and above the less urgent and more contingent need for laboring-class consumption made it impossible to reconcile working people with universal improvement. More conservative writers recognized this, claiming that laborers were constitutionally incapable of sustained rational conduct and too inured to misery to possess any potential for development. Instead, conservative commentators appealed to the need to restrain plebeian consumption, appealing to strategies aimed at maintaining structures of mystification and immiseration. One key for such conservative critics, anxious to point out the moral and economic deficiencies of the poor, was workers' consumption of gin.Footnote 52

Following the failure of the 1736 act and under the shelter of lenient legislation in 1743 and 1747, the spirits industry had become a truly national phenomenon. Its market stretched across the nation's alehouses and retailing outlets, and a significant part of this market lay among the urban laboring classes. Provincial towns throughout England complained of the gin drinking among their local labor forces. Still the largest single market, and the most visible, remained London. As laborers' ties to customary culture were progressively weakened, gin, which had become a part of proletarian life in the context of customary norms of consumption and social expenditure, probably functioned strongly as compensation and comfort. Working women, in particular, might enjoy drinking in the gin shops as part of their newfound wage-earning power and relative consumer freedom. Yet, they might just as easily buy it to drink at home as a cheap cordial for domestication, underemployment, desertion, poverty, sickness, or any of the symptoms of the women's fragile position in urban economy and social order.Footnote 53

The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1748, as thousands of soldiers and sailors were released from military service into London society, brought these longer-term developments sharply into view. As underemployment reached crisis proportions, crimes against property became a fixation for a ruling class that perceived itself to be under threat from a turbulent and ungovernable people. In this context, another assault on the gin trade, seen as profiting from this disorder, became inevitable. This time, the social forces arrayed in favor of reform were stronger, and those against it were substantially weakened. Although the spirits trade had grown, its relative importance to the national economy, given the profits to be made from grain exporting, was less. It was also less important to a state shifting its fiscal attention to genuine mass commodities like tea. Given these conditions, the heavily capitalized and established end of the trade was probably ready to contemplate reform of the lesser manufacturers and retailers in order to preserve its market position and save the industry from total destruction.Footnote 54

In 1751, a group of reforming M.P.s, with the backing of prominent churchmen and public luminaries, began to agitate for and formulate a bill to reform the spirits trade, this time focusing attention on the distillers. The bill met with little opposition either in Parliament or in the wider public debate and passed fairly quietly into law. An examination of the reform interest and its ideological production shows that the gin debates embodied and expressed the conditions and ideological changes sketched out above, replicating developments in social relations and social thought central to this phase of capitalist development. But it also demonstrates why the gin debates were so important and what was particular about the ideas and concepts they expressed.

The reform writers of 1751 were notable in combining their advocacy of philanthropic reform as part of a holistic vision of national improvement that sought to develop national commerce, prosperity, and refinement. Hogarth, Isaac Maddox, the Bishop of Worcester, and Josiah Tucker were all proponents of the British Fisheries scheme. Tucker, who was living in Bristol, was on close terms with Robert Nugent, M.P. for Bristol and among the bill's backers. Both were strong advocates for the Bristol merchant community. Hogarth, Maddox, and Tucker were all also closely involved with charitable activities both in London and in the wider nation. Hogarth was active in the Foundling Hospital, Maddox was a prime mover behind the Worcester Infirmary and was also active with the London Hospitals, and Tucker was a keen promoter of the Bristol infirmary. For these people, commerce and moral activism went hand in hand.Footnote 55

The writer who least fits this profile was Henry Fielding, a justice on the Middlesex bench. Fielding's wide-ranging Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robberies appealed for a reform of the spirits trade. The tract demonstrates how far conservatism had developed from the early eighteenth century. Fielding drew on the language of luxury in his diagnosis of the causes of social disorder. However, he used the idea of luxury in a manner far more reminiscent of Mandeville than of the civic humanist or Protestant reform traditions used by early eighteenth-century conservatives. Luxury and social disorder, he claimed, were an inevitable price of commercial development, costs that had to be assessed against the utility of wealth creation and dealt with pragmatically. Gin, about which he said relatively little, was a prime example. Fielding closely followed the substance of Wilson's pamphlet, claiming that gin was a species of luxury that dispersed its canker into the bowels of the nation. Yet its disutility lay, not in its status as a luxury but, rather, in its status as a “luxury of the vulgar.” It removed fear and shame, which were socially useful in securing labor. It also killed the useful laborers who created wealth and the soldiers and sailors who defended the nation and supported its trade. Such, he claimed, were arguments enough for reforming the trade. Fielding might lament the passing of ancient forms of government and ancient deference, but he legislated as a modern pragmatist, deferring to the nation's economic interest.Footnote 56

By contrast, Maddox embraced commerce and moral reform as improving forces. Maddox, a self-made man and the son of an artisan, published his pamphlet urging reform of the spirits trade shortly after Fielding's intervention. He too emphasized the disastrous effect on the labor force, reiterating the familiar arguments about fear, shame, and idleness. But he supplemented this with an entirely new stress on the commerce and consumption of the laboring classes. “How many consumers of the general product of the Nation are annually killed,” he demanded, “and how many Commodities and how many Utensils does this pernicious Gin supplant or supply the place of?” Maddox was clear that the nation stood to lose a valuable market for home manufactures if it allowed the spirits trade to live.Footnote 57

This emphasis on the commercial exchanges of the laborer, this extension of civil society to embrace the laboring people, inevitably enhanced the social and economic importance of their domestic and familial lives. Reformulating laborers as property owners in labor, exchanging their commodity in pursuit of their desires, meant that capitalist ideology had to address these lives in a way that would accord to them forms of affect and modes of rational conduct previously confined to property owners. The domestic and familial lives of the poor now came under the public scrutiny of the propertied, just as they became configured as “private” lives. And gin was now seen in the new contexts of its effects on the private home and on the subjectivity of private individuals.Footnote 58

Maddox provides an example of the turn to the domestic sphere. He bade his readers: “Look in on the dwelling of a regular industrious workman of the like Occupation of the slaves of gin.” One could see immediately, he claimed, that “many trades have been employed to provide clothes and furnish a homely but decent and cleanly habitation for himself, his wife and healthy Children.” By contrast, “the noisome abode of the Gin-drinkers, if they have any settled abode at all, shall be void of every thing decent or even necessary.”Footnote 59 The domestic sphere here was a site whose condition and worth could be assessed through its material condition, by the commodities that mediated its relations to the civil society of commercial exchanges within which laboring people could now be incorporated. Gin disrupted the ideal of a regular and respectable domestic “oeconomy” within private families.

The concept of oeconomy, as I have argued elsewhere, became of central importance in the new ideology of consumption. Oeconomy was constituted by the ordered management of the family household by the mother, while her husband labored for wages. She was to govern this realm. In order to maintain regular order, however, the wage-earning man must temper his leisure hours, providing rational oversight of her conduct. Good oeconomy, many argued, consisted of disposing of resources rationally and fostering the habits of respectable, decent consumption that would refine manners and develop the capacity for familial affect. Thus, commerce and sentimental refinement were seen as mutually reinforcing, in line with contemporary moral philosophy.Footnote 60

A pamphlet written to accompany Hogarth's pair of engravings of the same year, Beer Street and Gin Lane, gives a sense of this oeconomy and the disruptive role of gin. The anonymous author of the Dissertation upon Mr. Hogarth's Six Prints (Gin Lane and Beer Street, plus the Four Stages of Cruelty) supplemented Hogarth's images by conducting his readers on an imaginary tour through the world hidden by the crumbling walls of Gin Lane. “Household Oeconomy, so requisite in a poor man's family, has not the least Appearance among these wretched people,” the author lamented. “Cast your Eyes around the room and take notice of its furniture,” he urged, “What can you see that is not offensive, or carries not the marks of misery and wretchedness.” “It will be much,” he claimed, “if there is any thing worth Two-pence in the whole apartment, either in cloths, Linen or Woolen.”Footnote 61 Everything the family owned had gone, been sold or pawned, to secure more gin.

Familial affect was also perverted by the gin-drinking woman. While her husband neglected his paternal duties, drinking with his workmates, the wife and mother lapsed into irrational and false desires, manifesting an affect that could only result in the destruction of her family. “Modesty is entirely laid aside” by gin-addicted women. The true pleasures of domestic decency and respectability are replaced by “the Enjoyment of their delightful companion, the gin bottle.” Mothers addled by alcohol would allow their children to crawl around “half naked tho' in the coldest weather … half starved for want of nourishment,” yet consider themselves loving parents by feeding them “a spoonful of their own delightful cordial” to “stop their little gaping mouths.” “O monstrous Depravity of Human nature!,” exclaimed the author, “how capable of noblest excellencies … and yet how cover'd with Disgrace and sunk in Corruption.”Footnote 62 This emphasis on distorted affect and irrational behavior was crucial. It signaled the emergence of a key concept that expressed the forms of spirits drinking and explained to polite society how poor people could so desperately want something so dangerous to themselves and so inimical to society. It indicated the development of a concept of alcoholic addiction, of a species of desire that was not real desire.

Writers of the 1750s emphasized, with almost mantra-like frequency, the effects of gin on the rational component of human subjectivity, often drawing on the works of men like Hales. Tucker claimed that gin induced a peculiar form of intoxication, a kind of “instantaneous drunkenness where a man hath no time to recollect or think whether he hath had enough or no.” “His reason,” Tucker claimed, “is gone before he is aware.” The author of the Dissertation argued that, though “endowed with reason,” the gin-drinking man quickly became “a slave to his appetites and follows each dictate of his senses, how wild and extravagant soever they be.” Troubled constantly with “Anxieties,” his money was quickly spent and his life “destitute of every rational pleasure.” Rationality was seen as essential to any authentic experience of pleasure, and the loss of this managerial reason resulted in a form of nonpleasure. This was even more visible in women, whose rational capacity was supposedly more slender. Once habituated to spirits, the author of the Dissertation argued, a woman “will never be satisfied without it, whatever means she uses to procure a supply.” A woman addicted to gin would do “anything that will fetch a penny,” so that she might “have what she so continually longs for.”Footnote 63

The concepts of addiction, insanity, and false desires abound in these writings. They are also forcefully expressed in Hogarth's two engravings.Footnote 64Beer Street represents a scene of controlled and enlightened enjoyment, of pleasure agreeably harnessed to commercial development, affectionately parodied in its comic representation of fat proletarians and artisans. There are more particular indications as well: the central group drink English ale during a period of rest from work outside a prosperous alehouse. The labor they have interrupted is itself the consequence of the propertied elites' legitimate pursuit of politeness and fashionable opulence, while the copy of the king's speech encouraging the promotion of commerce and reform in his kingdom being read by the Billingsgate fish sellers conveys that the nation's governors share the common interest in prosperity.

In Gin Lane, by contrast, desire has run insane, having become a form of ersatz pleasure. The economy of Gin Lane, located in the impoverished parish of St. Giles, is dark and predatory, peopled by those who profit from the destruction of degeraded laborers: pawnbrokers, distillers, and undertakers. The parish's material condition echoes the physical and mental destruction of the gin-sodden laboring people whose insane compulsion drives them to pawn their household goods and work tools to secure their fatal drink. The central embodiment of this false affect is the mother, her disease-wracked body telling of her prostitution, a hollow and deathly smile smeared across her face, allowing her child to fall from her arms while she pinches a little more snuff. She is the embodiment of the transient pleasures of drunkenness triumphing over the capacity for rational pleasure.

This vision of the objective effects of gin, seen from the outside, was given an equally disturbing subjective form in a poem of the same year entitled Strip Me Naked, or Royal Gin Forever. This poem contains echoes of the mock-elegies and odes of the 1730s, but the form is completely different. Instead, familiar images are regrouped around new ones, structured by a first-person narrative that functions almost as a novel in identifying the reader, however reprovingly, with the heroine. It takes the form of a series of utterances that come in rushes, replicating in their effect the drunkenness they describe.

This poem describes from the inside the world that Hogarth grimly satirizes from the outside, combining all the elements from other writings: the decay of the domestic economy, the mother's dependence on the pawnbroker, the false hope and fake affect provided by the drink, the illusory power threatening all forms of order, and the dark hints of rape emerging from the loss of care and true self-regard. More than anything, perhaps, it conveys the desperate need that characterizes addicts. In aestheticizing its subject, the poem generates, possibly counter to the author's intention, a more sympathetic response, muddying the causal chain that is supposed to ensure the woman's culpability. This points to the enduring importance of the gin debates.

The concept of addiction emerged at midcentury, fulfilling a specific need in British capitalist society. Writers who positively identified themselves with commercial accumulation as a universally improving force and who wished to extend its benefits across humanity, had to explain why so many laboring people in cities preferred the dubious pleasures of compulsive drinking to those of thrifty accumulation and judicious expenditure. In formulating their concept of addiction, they drew on ideas and potentials that had been forged in the very different debates of the 1730s, reshaping them to the needs of a society ideally considered to rest on the commerce of private families rationally managing their desires in pursuit of true pleasure. Within this context, gin's ability to destroy reason was in turn seen to destroy the capacity for authentic pleasure, substituting an ersatz pleasure built on compulsive consumption. This addiction made laboring people unfit for rational production and consumption, as well as condemning them to misery. The writers of the midcentury drew on a range of competing notions derived from the earlier period of ideological crisis. Progressive natural-scientific explanations of intoxication and political writers' analyses of the operation of society were combined with the moral vocabulary of conservatives and the critical rhetorics of satirists. But whereas, in their early eighteenth-century context, these ideas had formed part of the last phase of a struggle for hegemony by distinct ideological forces, related to the struggle to expand or delimit commercial development, by the 1750s the objective had changed. The task for the midcentury bourgeois reformer was less to comprehend the contradictions of an entire society than to interpret the actions of a specific and delimited social class.

Addiction, in the 1750s, functioned as a highly ideological and unself-conscious explanation of a particular social class's failure to progress. But the concept contained elements produced in the more crisis-ridden and self-conscious atmosphere of the 1730s. Perhaps most important among these elements was the satirical literature's subversive emphasis on universal corruption and the impossibility of virtue or affect in urban society. At midcentury, the concept of addiction transformed a set of ideas that had previously functioned to describe the sickness of a whole society. These evils were rendered now as private and local, employed to describe the malaise of a specific social group and the effects of drunkenness on the private individual. This could then be vectored onto laboring-class families now firmly situated within the commercial society in order to explain their failure to fulfill their potential. The loss of the social self-consciousness that had characterized the satirical literature, produced in a period of intense ideological crisis and rapid social change, was replaced by a clearer attention to the particular plight of laboring people in capitalist society. However, within this altered social context, blame was now firmly placed on working people themselves.

Yet, as Strip Me Naked shows, the rhetorics of estrangement and alienation, when combined with the midcentury's clearer focus on the particularity of proletarian experience, endowed the idea of addiction with potential for more critical and socially explosive usages. Later social movements mobilized the social phenomena of addiction and alcoholism as symptoms of a fundamental malaise in the political order rather than as the causes of moral and economic failure. For addiction expressed some of the content, some of the consequences, of the alienation characteristic of urban capitalist society. Addiction thus formed part of the broader process of human estrangement that subsumed eighteenth-century social relations. The history of the gin trade and of the gin craze not only reflected the history of capitalist development in the eighteenth century, it eventually was to furnish modern political movements with a crucial conceptual tool in their critique of the existing social order.