When did English capitalism begin? There is no uncomplicated answer to this question. The concept encompasses both an economic system and those ideologies that sustain it, and neither came into being ex nihilo. We may root its origins somewhere around the recession of feudalism, the increase of international trade, the rise of a Weberian Protestant work ethic, the evolution of commerce, and other developments in the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economic landscape. The origins of capitalism are huge and messy, but prodigality and the parable allow us a curiously unambiguous litmus test of its early developments. For G. K. Chesterton, ‘The modern world began by Bentham writing the Defence of Usury’, and Jeremy Bentham indeed provides us with a lucid example of a particular shift. When writing in the late eighteenth century of how thrift and prodigality are perceived, Bentham invokes the parable and writes the following:

As this book has demonstrated, such sentiments were utterly alien two centuries earlier. Even among portrayals of sympathetic prodigals in the seventeenth century, prodigals are never spoken of with such unabashed sympathy, nor is their prodigality ever cited as a reason for which they should be welcomed back into society. From 1500 to 1642, we instead see a developing awareness that the prodigality once condemned in the morality drama of Chapter One can no longer be so easily excised from society. Prodigality was attractive, clearly, but more than this – prodigality was useful. How successfully can The London Prodigal denounce excessive borrowing when such lending practices are essential to its comic conclusion? How can we see Middletonian drama as entirely condemnatory of consumerist culture when the high street was the hub of social interaction and productive romance? How can we reject the usurer when these plots’ resolutions so often depend upon him? Simply put, we cannot. The conclusion of prodigal son drama is that prodigality, though problematic, is also awfully useful.