As soon as newspapers, catering to England’s new urbane peoples, began describing common executions, the crowds attending them were seen as indifferent to their moral message. By the middle of the eighteenth century, execution rituals seemed equally problematic. Critics perceived hangings to be so frequent, so large-scale and so brutalizing to an even minimally refined sensibility as to defeat their deterrent purpose. In 1783, London officials sought to redress these problems by devising a new execution ritual, staged immediately outside the prison and courthouse. Within four decades, this quintessentially urban execution ritual had been adopted in almost all other English counties, even as cities on the continent pointedly moved executions outside urban centres. Yet still executions seemed ineffective. Following a particularly intense crisis in the 1780s, England’s traditional ruling elites sought to preserve the “Bloody Code” by reducing the scale of hangings to historically low levels.

This chapter examines eighteenth-century moral debates about wealth, poverty and corruption in the emerging commercial state. In particular, it discusses four important moments in these debates: Bernard Mandeville’s celebration of avarice and vice, the fustigations of writers like Bolingbroke, Trenchard and Gordon about the corruption they attributed to financial and commercial innovations, Adam Ferguson’s worries about the corruptions of commercial modernity, and, finally, Adam Smith’s indignation at the spirit of monopoly that threatened to undermine the moral and material gains of commercial society.

The bronze horseman issued an ominous warning in 1317. The fall of the horseman’s orb caused grave concerns for the emperor Andronikos II (r. 1282–1328). Andronikos II had this renowned imperial monument restored in 1317. He ensured that the bronze horseman would remain standing as an embodiment of Palaiologan imperial renewal. Yet Byzantine sources are silent about this important event. A range of evidence suggests that the Byzantine historian Nikephoros Gregoras intentionally underplayed the incident. By protectively demurring about the actual object that had fallen – the symbol of sovereignty and dominion – he concealed contemporary anxieties behind a rhetorical façade of successful restoration. The horseman’s insecure grasp of the orb and the orb’s inexplicable mobility became a flash point for international concerns about the future of Byzantium. Audiences as far away from Constantinople as London, Cordoba, and Moscow became preoccupied with the orb. This chapter reveals that the presence or absence of the orb became a key element in the reception of the monument and the evaluation of Constantinople’s future. Palaiologan rulers repeatedly spent enormous sums of money to ensure that the orb remained in the bronze horseman's hand.

The idea of capacity is central to Godwin’s political theory. In spite of his assurance that equality is unrelated to physical or intellectual ability, Godwin makes individual and social liberty contingent upon the types of contributions one’s capacities allow. His political system inevitably produces exceptions (those who do not or cannot contribute to the general good) for which he needs to devise additional measures. People who lack the right kinds of mental and physical capacities prove to be an intractable difficulty. In his fiction, Godwin centralizes the idea that the mind should work in concert with the body, and sees incapacity in either of these as socially and personally problematic. We see this in his repeated use of automata, dolls, and characters who disengage from their bodies in various ways; and in his fictional use of rejuvenation and cure. Godwin speculates that when reason governs society, illness and incapacity will no longer be present. His attitude towards deformity is quite separate from his views on capacity. Deformity, in Godwin’s fiction, is usually a visual sign of an evil character, and he does not articulate the prodigious phase of disability.