This approach to Thomas More’s 1516 (1551) Utopia has two central aims. Firstly, it addresses the numerous, and frequently overlooked, economic references included in More’s work and their significance in the context of early modern English and European economics. These economic concepts and discussions, once identified, will be linked to a wider preoccupation, this one of an epistemological nature: how the functional system described (nascent capitalism) may be approached as a symbolic as much as a material process, paying special attention to its potential as a signifying system. In other words, the examination of the economic anxieties expressed in the work will allow us to explore the material turbulences that nascent capitalism caused, as well as the complexity of the Utopian conceptual response to those turbulences. To examine the links between the socioeconomic and the epistemological will be the second aim of this work.