Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (review)

Blair Hoxby's Mammon's Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton is an ambitious, compellingly argued book which will be essential reading for Miltonists, scholars of the seventeenth century generally and anyone interested in the relationship between literature and economic thought in the early modern period. Focusing on Milton but offering careful readings of Dryden's and Davenant's poetry and marshaling atlases, paintings, statuary and public architecture both Dutch and English, Hoxby argues that Milton's writing and the poetry of his age are deeply engaged with a public discourse of trade. Beginning with A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle and ending with Samson Agonistes, Hoxby demonstrates that Milton is, in fact, an economic thinker but also that his ideas changed considerably in relation to the political developments of the Revolution, Interregnum and Restoration. Ultimately however, Hoxby finds a consistency in Milton's position: "from beginning to end Milton opposed the 'great Marchants of this world' whether they took the form of monopolistic churchmen or chartered companies. He consistently attacked fixed forms and visible powers and in doing so, he made various uses of that strain of economic analysis that sought to describe the power of independent initiatives and invisible processes" (237). Hoxby makes his case persuasively and in detail, paying careful attention to the terms of seventeenth-century debates and to poetic echoes and appropriations of explicitly economic discourse.

Mammon's Music is divided into four sections. The first deals with A Maske and Areopagitica, the second with Republican and Royalist discourses of trade, the third with the Restoration, Dryden, Davenant, Denham, and Cooper as well as Paradise Lost, and the fourth with the discourse of work and building after the Great Fire, and its relation to Samson's labors in the mill. In the first section Hoxby both establishes Milton's involvement with economic discourse and demonstrates the first key transition in his economic thinking. Comus's arguments to the Lady, Hoxby notes, resemble those made by Thomas Mun in the 1620s that both "production and consumption were required to turn the wheels of commerce" (20). They also resemble the arguments of the mercantilist theorists such as Mun insofar as they stress that the forces they invoke are "deterministic rather than normative." The Lady's response speaks to the economic vehicle rather than the sexual tenor of Comus's arguments and invokes an older tradition of economic thought, one that presupposes an inelastic supply of wealth and focuses on distributive justice. Insofar as we can assume that Milton sides with the Lady, then he appears to oppose the new economic reasoning. Thus, as Hoxby notes, "it is remarkable to see how nearly Milton converges on Comus's arguments for economic and sexual circulation in his tracts of the 1640s" (24). Areopagitica, Hoxby argues, is indebted both to antimonopoly case law, and to contemporary arguments in favor of free trade. In it Milton offers a "model of intellectual exchange that, relying on the theories and arguments of free trade advocates, contended that men could best generate truth when they were left free to exercise their industry and employ their skill in producing, venting and purchasing ideas in an open market" (26).

In the second section, Hoxby explores how Milton's appropriation and enlargement of economic ideas in his pamphlets of the 1640s was part of a larger political discourse linking Republicanism with trade, a discourse which then began to shift when Cromwell changed his foreign policy from fighting England's great trading rivals, the Dutch, to fighting the Spanish just as England went into a trade depression in 1658; this permitted the Royalists to construct a vision of a restored monarch as a restoration of trade, and appropriate the language and imagery of earlier Republican encomiae to trade. At this juncture Milton's position also starts to shift again. Resisting...