In 1730 John Southall, a London bug destroyer, published A Treatise of Buggs, usually described as the first scientific study of bedbugs. Southall claimed the pests had reached England about sixty years earlier, arriving with imported foreign timber after the Great Fire of 1666. His account includes an unusual trip to Kingston, Jamaica, where a man who had once been enslaved taught him a liquor that killed the insects. Back in England, Southall bred bedbugs for eighteen months, recording their food preferences, combative behaviour and mating habits. He noted their transparent, striped shells and marvelled at their habits under the microscope. The treatise is also an advertisement, ending with a price list for his extermination services. Its mix of disgust and admiration shows a time when bedbugs did not yet carry the class stigma they later acquired.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.