One hundred and eighty-two overlooked British comments on Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees , 1724–1800

The Fable of the Bees (1714) by Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch émigré physician and acerbic satirist, provoked some of the fiercest debates of the eighteenth century by arguing that luxury and vice were the driving forces of modern commercial societies. However, studies of these polemical storms remain largely reliant on Frederick Benjamin Kaye’s incomplete appendix of contemporary references to Mandeville in the Clarendon Edition of the Fable (1924). To address this historiographical lacuna, this research note presents substantial new evidence on the Fable’s reception by listing and describing 182 overlooked eighteenth-century British responses to Mandeville.