The tradition would continue: in the nineteenth century Herman Melville described the happy valley of Typee11 in the Marquesas as a place where there were ‘no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no debts of honour … no poor relations … no destitute widows … no beggars; no debtors’ prisons; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or to sum up all in one word – no money!’ The idea was that people were happier when they lived uncluttered lives close to nature, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Stoics12 had made much of this ‘Golden Age’ fantasy: Seneca
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