In 1711, Joseph Addison published an essay in The Spectator, describing a stroll through London's Royal Exchange. His observations on the jostling crowds are most frequently cited by historians as evidence of cosmopolitanism, but they also reveal the intersection of cultural identity, food and commerce in the period. The links between taste, trade, and patterns of consumption that had developed in the seventeenth century were woven into the fabric of everyday life in the early eighteenth century. Earlier justifications for international trade and rationalisations of luxury became enmeshed in a relationship of mutual influence with the development of social norms and the demand for consumer goods, each factor pushing and pulling the other. Addison's commentary shows how the connection between food and commerce had coalesced to influence the author's idea of what it meant to be British at that time. Using language reminiscent of early seventeenthcentury economic authors who claimed the collective benefit of trade, he acknowledged the early origins, and influences of the international circulation of goods.

In his essay, Addison joyfully proclaimed himself a ‘Citizen of the World’ as he rubbed elbows with foreign businessmen, awash in a sea of different languages. Even as he imagined himself a Dane, a Swede, or a Frenchman, Addison was nonetheless filled with patriotic pleasure by the pre-eminent global status of the London Exchange: ‘It gives me a secret Satisfaction, and in some measure, gratifies my Vanity, as I am an Englishman, to see so rich an Assembly of Countrymen and Foreigners consulting together upon the private Business of Mankind, and making this Metropolis a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth.’ Addison saw Nature's design in the distribution of goods across the earth as an encouragement for mutual interdependence through trade, however, he claimed this universal commerce as part of a British empire: ‘Trade, without enlarging the British Territories, has given us a kind of additional Empire: It has multiplied the Number of the Rich, made our Landed Estates infinitely more Valuable than they were formerly, and added to them an Accession of other Estates as Valuable as the Lands themselves.’ This declaration of non-occupational imperialism was tied to the increased the value of ‘British Estates’, emphasising that the wealth generated through trade was retained in Britain.