Romances of free trade british literature, laissez faire, and the global nineteenth century

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Romances of Free Trade


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Romances of Free Trade
British Literature,
Laissez-Faire, and the
Global Nineteenth Century
Ayşe Çelikkol

1


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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Çelikkol, Ayşe.
Romances of free trade : British literature, laissez-faire, and the global nineteenth century /
Ayşe Çelikkol.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-976900-1
1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Free trade in literature.
3. Capitalism in literature. 4. Economics in literature. 5. Globalization in literature.
6. Sovereignty in literature. 7. Authors, English—19th century—Political and social views.
8. Economics and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title.
PR468.F74C45 2011
820.9′3553—dc22
2010036265

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

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For Öznur Çelikkol and Ahmet Çelikkol, my parents


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Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Narrating Global Capitalism in the Romance Mode

ix
3

2. Walter Scott’s Disloyal Smugglers

21

3. Meandering Merchants and Narrators in Captain Marryat’s
Nautical Fiction

43

4. Harriet Martineau on the Fertility of Exchange

63

5. Promiscuity, Commerce, and Closure in Early Victorian Drama

83

6. Mutuality, Marriage, and Charlotte Brontë’s Free Traders

101

7. The Compression of Space in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit

123

8. Epilogue: Cycles of Capitalist Expansion

143

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

151
177
185


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Acknowledgments

I have had the great fortune of having extraordinary mentors who have inspired
and encouraged me from the earliest iterations of the ideas that shaped this book.
Helena Michie and Robert L. Patten, my dissertation directors at Rice University’s
English Department, have offered generous criticism and suggestions during and far
beyond my years at Rice. I thank them for their unending support and guidance.
Many scholars and intellectual communities have provided support and inspiration over the years as I worked on this book. Betty Joseph always asked difficult
questions and encouraged me to take on challenges; Peter C. Caldwell helped me
work through the history of political economy; and Ed Snow allowed me to think
about language like never before. Dickens Universe has been a source of intellectual
wonder and pleasure, and I am deeply grateful to John Jordan and everybody else
who makes the Universe work. My colleagues at Macalester College from 2005 to
2009 gave me the gift of their warm smiles and more. In addition to providing useful
feedback on my writing, Theresa Krier inspired me with her prose. Daylanne English, as chair, created many opportunities for me to conduct research and collect
feedback from experts in the field during the most critical years of my work on this
book. At Macalester, drafting chapters in my office late at night would not have been
as much fun without Maura Tarnoff writing next door. Macalester’s Wallace Grant
funded crucial archival research at the British Library. While I worked through the
ix


x

Acknowledgments

chapters, Tony Ro encouraged me to take on new challenges confidently. Liz Fenton
read my drafts, commented on them, and made me laugh and think. During my time
in Minneapolis, I benefited from the works-in-progress meetings of the nineteenthcentury subfield at the University of Minnesota’s English Department, and I thank
Andrew Elfenbein and Michael Hancher for welcoming me to the group. Lauren

Goodlad and Ian Duncan kindly offered incisive criticism on a draft of the introduction. Forest Pyle, Tamara Ketagbian, Anna Kornbluh, Michael Meeuwis, and
Amanda Claybough offered valuable feedback at various stages of the project. As I
worked on the final drafts, William Coker patiently provided feedback.
I concluded the manuscript at the institution where I first discovered the pleasures of literary and cultural analysis—my undergraduate alma mater, Bilkent University in Turkey. I am grateful to Dean Talât Halman and my colleagues in the
English Literature and American Culture and Literature Departments at Bilkent for
warmly supporting this project. Finally, I would like to thank my anonymous readers
for their valuable criticism and the staff at Oxford University Press for their help in
preparing this book.
A version of this book’s second chapter appeared in ELH: English Literary
History 74, no. 4 (2007), and I am grateful for permission to reprint.

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Romances of Free Trade


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1
Introduction
Narrating Global Capitalism
in the Romance Mode

To portray the population of one’s own country as criminal is quite audacious,
but that is precisely what the popular British novelist G. P. R. James did in 1845
when he published The Smuggler, a historical novel in which the public voraciously

consumes contraband goods. James promised to offer a “correct picture of the state
of society” in the late eighteenth century:
Scarcely any one of the maritime countries was, in those days, without its gang
of smugglers; for if France was not opposite, Holland was not far off ; and if
brandy was not the object, nor silk, nor wine, yet tea and cinnamon, and hollands . . . were things duly estimated by the British public, especially when they
could be obtained without the payment of custom-house duties.1
This portrayal may initially appear to be an artless meditation on bygone days, but in
fact it comments on the economic transformation that was taking place in James’s
own time. What the opinionated narrator condemns throughout The Smuggler—
obtaining foreign goods without the payment of customs duties—was becoming
legal when James composed the novel. In the first half of the nineteenth century,
liberal economists in Britain insisted that imports should not be subject to high
duties or tariffs. The economic system that they proposed limited the state’s ability
to control commodity traffic across national borders and appeared to threaten sovereignty for this reason.
3


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Romances of Free Trade

Concerns about the seemingly uncontrollable circulation of commodities
and the bypassing of state authority, which James so astutely captured in The
Smuggler, coexisted with Britons’ confidence in their country’s economic and
political prowess in the first half of the nineteenth century. The prospect of free
trade—the economic system in which there are no legal restrictions on importation or exportation—offered hope that the nation would become wealthier and
stronger. Simultaneously, the proposal to abolish duties and tariffs inspired fears
about the loss of the distinction between the domestic and the foreign, as if the
circulation of commodities could dissolve national borders. As politicians and
the public considered abolishing restrictions on the consumption of foreign

commodities, individuals’ attachment to the homeland appeared to be hanging
in the balance. Roughly from the 1820s through the 1860s, many Britons
believed that the emergent system of free trade would undermine their sovereignty, just as pundits such as Thomas Friedman now warn Americans of a presumably flat world in which the West no longer has the upper hand. The
ubiquity of such concerns about the fate of patriotism and the nation-state in
early- and mid-nineteenth-century Britain renders the period a valuable, if surprising, gateway for historicizing globalization.
Amid controversy about free trade, literature undertook the cultural work of
inventing complex models of community and subjectivity correlating to the hypothetical dissolution of borders and the putative decline in sovereignty. For example,
in the literary imagination, unruly smugglers break off from their local communities
to trade whimsically, jolly merchant-sailors form multinational communities marked
by hedonism, and prestigious merchants spread around the desire to speculate as if it
were a contagious disease. Literary depictions of chaotic circulation matter not
because they describe the material reality of life in nineteenth-century Britain, but
because they demonstrate nineteenth-century British literature’s articulation of the
structural tension between capitalism and the nation-state: while the former needs
capital to move without barriers, the latter needs to present itself as a stable, enclosed
community. Romances of Free Trade argues that during the rise of free trade, literary
works played a special role in scrutinizing the tension between circulation and
enclosure, with numerous novelists, playwrights, and poets—including canonical
ones such as Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens, as well as noncanonical ones such as John Lettsom Elliot, Thomas Serle, and Ebenezer Elliott—
mapping abstract economic principles onto subjective experiences of community
and space.
This introduction first briefly charts economic developments that led to Britain’s
partial abolishment of prohibitive duties on importation and exportation. It subsequently suggests that during the rise of free trade, literature and economic writing in

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Introduction

5

tandem scrutinized the perceived threat to sovereignty. Literary works explored the
subjective consequences of free trade by correlating border-crossing commerce to
individuals’ feelings of liberation from, and harmony with, their communities. Asking
why literary works had the capacity to address the condition of global capitalism so
richly, the introduction sets up the book’s overall argument that the genre of romance
allowed early- and mid-nineteenth-century British literature to articulate key elements of what we may in retrospect call globalization: a heightened awareness of the
permeability of national borders and the sense of disorientation in space.

From Protectionism to Free Trade in British Economic History
International commerce became controversial—and discussions of it ubiquitous—
in the first half of the nineteenth century in Britain because the country appeared to
be transitioning from protectionism to free trade. In the protectionist system of the
eighteenth century, the government watched over British producers and merchants
by imposing prohibitively high duties on imports, so as to render domestic commodities more appealing than their counterparts from the Continent. Protectionist
policies were the result of so-called mercantilist principles, according to which
wealth is measured by the amount of bullion a state has in its reserves. Mercantilists
maintained that if the volume of importation exceeded that of exportation, the
national economy would suffer, and the people would get poorer. Though Adam
Smith’s Wealth of Nations provocatively suggested in 1776 that protectionism benefited neither the state nor the people, high duties remained in place. Protectionist
measures reached a new high in 1815, when the government imposed new Corn
Laws that virtually prohibited the importation of grain. In response, liberal political
economists such as David Ricardo called for the repeal of prohibitions and high
duties on imports and in doing so created a patriotic stir. “The new system,” wrote
one hysterical critic, “professes to give freedom to trade, to admit all foreign goods,
and to place the foreign producer on a level with the English one in the English
market.”2 From the protectionist perspective, it seemed as if patriotic attachment to
the homeland would dissolve along with the state’s regulation of commodity traffic
across national borders.
In retrospect, we know that free trade neither did away with all import duties nor

harmed British manufacturers or consumers. As protectionist laws were gradually
repealed from the 1840s through the 1860s, free trade measures paradoxically went
hand in hand with governmental interventions in the global economy and assured
Britain’s economic domination in the world.3 The prospect of free trade may have
initially inspired concerns about sovereignty, but its practice brought many distant


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Romances of Free Trade

parts of the world under Britain’s control, creating, as it were, an “informal empire”
that existed alongside its formal counterpart.4 As John Gallagher and Ronald
Robinson have shown, “mercantilist techniques of formal empire were being employed
to develop India in the mid-Victorian age at the same time as informal techniques of
free trade were being used in Latin America for the same purpose.”5 Britons’ interpretation of free trade as unpatriotic thus failed to predict the ways in which lower duties
and tariffs would benefit Britain. However naive protectionists may have been in
their inability to foresee the hegemonic uses of free trade, their concerns about commodity circulation astutely registered the border-defying nature of capitalism. As
Karl Marx wrote, capital strives “to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse.”6
For monetary investments to fetch profit continually under capitalism, markets must
keep expanding; as a result, the circulation of commodities resists legal measures that
aim to restrict their flow. Reactions to proposed free trade policies in nineteenthcentury Britain frequently displayed an implicit awareness of this dynamic.
The adoption of free trade policies and the maintenance of overseas colonies
together established Britain’s dominance in the world economy. However, Britons
in the early nineteenth century distinguished free trade from colonial commerce
because the latter had been operating through mercantilist principles in the past. In
the mercantilist version of the colonial system, the state promoted domestic goods,
which included colonial commodities, by imposing high duties on imports from the
Continent and the United States. The best example of protectionist colonialism is
the case of timber during the Napoleonic Wars. Because the government did not

want to be dependent on Baltic timber, it placed duties that made Canadian timber
far cheaper than its counterpart from continental Europe. An anti–free trade pamphlet published in 1848 succinctly reveals the competing vocabularies of free trade
and protectionism in the imperial context, when the pamphleteer asserts that the
empire would be undercut by laissez-faire:
Abolish the colonial system, and introduce in its place the principle of free
competition, and a great change necessarily takes place. England finds that she
can obtain her corn and timber at less cost from the Baltic than from America,
and the Canadian provinces, in their turn, may find that they can buy their
manufactures cheaper in Virginia than in Manchester. In such a case, supposing
the free trade principle to be in full operation, it is obvious that the import trade
of the colony and the parent state would greatly diminish, if not entirely cease.7
The competition between free trade and protectionist colonial practices fueled the
idea that the former threatened the nation-state, since the nation in question derived
its sense of identity and unity partly through its control over the colonies.

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Introduction

7

As the nineteenth century progressed, the mercantilist mode of colonialism
became partly outdated. Economic interventions by the metropole became less fashionable, with many champions of colonialism, from Thomas Babington Macaulay to
Harriet Martineau, supporting free trade over protectionism. At the same time, in
many cases the metropole continued to control economic production and distribution in the colonies. The case of Ceylon is a telling example of the persistence of
economic intervention in the nineteenth century. Even as mainstream political
economy idolized self-governing markets, Britain developed Ceylon as a plantation
economy for exporting coffee beans and cinnamon, and agricultural profits from the
plantations were largely remitted to the metropole. Political legislation cultivated a

tender balance between such protectionist practices and free trade. To be sure, the
weakening of protectionism partially undermined the appeal of colonial commodities: “The two leading imperial products of the 1830s, sugar and timber, as well as
other important commodities such as coffee, owed their position in the British market to preferences which only began to be eroded seriously in the 1840s,” notes the
historian P. J. Cain. Even when preferences for colonial commodities were rescinded,
however, the goal was to “increase revenues by rationalizing the tariff rather than to
break up the colonial system.”8 Insofar as colonialism was rooted in older mercantilist principles, it did not restrict state authority; for this reason, postcolonial criticism’s emphasis on the formal empire cannot fully reveal British subjects’ imaginative
treatment of commerce as the harbinger of a new world order that would compromise sovereignty. By attending to free trade paradigms that addressed the limits of
state authority and the volatility of trade partnerships, we can come closer to historicizing twenty-first-century meditations on the role of the nation-state amid
increasingly globalized markets and corporations.
To avoid oversimplifying notions of economic globalization, first I wish to
highlight that the emergence of the nation-state cannot be separated from the development of capitalism. The latter needs the cultural homogeneity, the legal guarantees, and the workforce that the former provides and sustains.9 At the same time,
capital cannot remain concentrated in any one nation-state for an indefinite amount
of time. Periodically, large amounts of capital become loose; what then follows is the
concentration of capital in the hands of a single state. For this reason, according to
world systems theory, capitalism is characterized by intervals of chaos, a “situation of
total and apparently irremediable lack of organization,” created by the swift and
multidirectional flow of capital.10 For example, chaos presided after the Dutch lost
their global power in the eighteenth century, until capital became more concentrated in England by the middle of the nineteenth. Despite the growing domination
of Britain in the world economy, however, the uncontainable mobility of capital
continued to inspire feelings of insecurity.


8

Romances of Free Trade

Protectionist zeal waned through the early Victorian period, but the adoption of
free trade measures was gradual and partial. The infamous Corn Laws that restricted
the importation of grain were repealed in 1846, as a result of the physical urgency of
the need for grain during the Irish famine. Even though the importation of grain was

no longer controversial after the 1840s, Britain continued to witness intense debates
on two issues in free trade: Sino-British commerce, especially the opium trade that
thrived despite strict prohibitions imposed by China, and the Navigation Acts, which
prohibited foreign shipping in British waters. Like the repeal of the Corn Laws, the
repeal of the Navigation Acts in 1849 is typically taken to symbolize the triumph of
free trade, but the transition into free trade was in fact perpetually incomplete in and
beyond Britain. Today, countries that ferociously advocate free markets continue to
control supply and demand through subsidies and tariffs.11

Disanchored Subjects and Borderless Geographies
in Literature
The obvious medium for discussing free trade principles in nineteenth-century Britain was political economy, the precursor to the modern science of economics. Political economists discussed whether high-volume importation would drain gold
reserves, how global competition would affect British manufacture, and which
social class would benefit most from lower duties. However, the topic of free trade
also had a bearing on the function of the state, the borders of the homeland, and the
fate of patriotism. Could patriotism survive if the state did not protect domestic
producers and merchants? In a world of chaotic circulation, how could individuals
have a sense of belonging to a nation? These questions, which were tangentially
addressed in economic writing, were simultaneously taken up by literary works,
which featured complex vocabularies for exploring the sense of belonging.
In formulating the convergences between political economy and literature, I follow the lead of many studies in what Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen call
new economic criticism, which show that the two discourses together scrutinized
the conditions of modernity. As these studies have revealed, literature and political
economy both addressed a wide range of issues, from the meaning of value to the
significance of human sensations.12 The notion of free trade, I maintain, provided a
particularly resonant overlap between literature and political economy, because each
discourse sought to mediate the threat that commercial circulation posed to the ideal
of the nation-state’s secure economic and cultural borders. As I examine the intersections of economic writing and imaginative literature, I treat them as distinct discourses, given that in the nineteenth century what Mary Poovey calls “the break-up

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Introduction

9

of the continuum of writing that mediated value” had already taken place, and political economists claimed that their work constituted an autonomous branch of scientific inquiry.13 At the same time, I acknowledge and analyze texts that blur the
distinction between literature and economics, such as Harriet Martineau’s tales,
which famously illustrate principles of political economy. Further, recognizing the
proliferation of genres within economic writing—popular pamphlets and essays in
periodicals, as well as formal treatises in political economy—I take into consideration now-forgotten texts by William Spence, David Robinson, Albert Williams,
Edward Edwards, and Colonel Thompson, as well as canonical works by Adam
Smith, David Ricardo, and J. R. McCulloch.
In conjunction with economic discourses, literature imagined the transnational
condition that the new economic system implied. Transnationality often describes a
situation in which territorial boundaries are regularly transgressed, if not dissolved,
by economic, political, or artistic traffic. Even though the nineteenth century is typically remembered as the heyday of the nation-state in Europe, various scholars have
recently documented transnational alliances in the nineteenth century, governing,
among other things, artistic and literary production across the Channel and the
Atlantic. Commerce was not transnational in this sense: it depended heavily on the
legal system, the military, and other state apparatuses for the guarantee of property
and contacts, even after the gradual adoption of free trade measures after the 1840s.
I use the term transnational in this study not to suggest that commerce actually
bypassed statist intervention, but rather to emphasize that free trade rhetoric produced a kind of postnational ideal that threatened to undermine patriotic attachment to a homeland conceived in more paternalistic terms. At stake in free trade was
a transformation in the function of the nation-state: the idea that citizens would
need protection from the vicissitudes of the economy was becoming extinct, alongside tariffs and duties. Enacting the principle that the best government is the one
that governs least, laissez-faire in international commerce heralded a liberal state no
longer in charge of ensuring the well-being of its subjects. The emergent global order,
it seemed, would hinge on this new kind of state, whose conception inspired nostalgia for the more nationalist counterpart it was to replace.
Unfettered by legal prohibitions or regulations, commodity traffic would become

uncontainable, volatile, random—so claimed opponents of free trade. Amid economic controversy, Britons contemplated the effects of such traffic. How would
vertiginous circulation restructure the individual experiences of communal belonging and spatial mobility? Literary works played a privileged role in addressing this
question, because they had the capacity to offer imagined identities and spaces that
bypassed the nation-state. One of the earliest literary tropes for articulating the crisis of patriotism vis-à-vis capitalism was the smuggler. Typically disloyal to the


10

Romances of Free Trade

homeland, this figure represented the loss of the distinction between domestic and
foreign. Fictional smugglers were disloyal to local suppliers they knew in person,
opting instead to buy commodities from distant lands. Ensuring the circulation of
commodities across national borders, they claimed to be courageous underground
practitioners of free trade in the age of protectionism. As contemporary humorists
recognized, the imagined significance of smuggling was ironic: it is safe to assume
that smugglers actually supported protectionism, since without high duties there
would be no use for contraband trade. Beyond the figure of the smuggler, various
kinds of fictional merchants boasted transnational identities. Alternately detached
from all national communities or in harmony with humanity as a whole, commercial magnates in the literary imagination possess enough power to domineer legislators, bureaucrats, and other representatives of state power.
New economic paradigms of commerce form the basis of peculiar models of
community and space in nineteenth-century British literature. The flow of commodities creates borderless spaces, which, devoid of national markers, call into question the very notion of homeland. Natural and urban settings in which exchange
networks flourish can each represent the apparent waning of state authority. For
example, the sublime power of the open seas draws attention to the limits of individual countries’ power; idyllic exchange in valleys overtaken  by  natural growth
minimizes the role of the nation-state in shaping the land; chaotic urban  spaces
hosting ubiquitous merchants suggest the impossibility of managing national territory. Flourishing in various genres from historical and nautical fiction to domestic
melodrama and the multiplot novel, such tropes helped to imagine transnational
powers that would oppose the nation-state’s prerogative to turn land into territory.
The popular novelist Captain Marryat’s Snarleyyow, or the Dog Fiend (1837)
epitomizes the literary capacity to imagine transnationality during the rise of free

trade, specifically in the form of disanchored subjects and borderless geographies. A
nautical romance, Snarleyyow depicts unruly seamen of diverse national backgrounds who deal commodities and defeat all state apparatuses designed to control
commercial traffic. Operating in the open seas, their multinational community recognizes no authority, be it that of a captain or the state. Spontaneity and defiance, if
not anarchy, characterize the globalized existence of free-trading subjects in the dystopic world of Snarleyyow. Ironically, the more Marryat attempts to balance the
pleasures he depicts with dull assertions about the need for discipline, the more he
reveals the affective appeal of laissez-faire. If commodities and merchants in this
novel are always on the move, the structure of the novel replicates their disorderliness. Sprawling and circular, the narrative matches the trajectories of the fictional
commodities it depicts. The romance penchant for episodic adventures becomes a
formal corollary to the theme of uncontainable commerce.

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Introduction

11

As nineteenth-century British literature portrayed the loss of central authority,
it pinpointed structural and affective tensions between capitalism and the ideal of
the bounded nation-state. The literary capacity to address free trade debates was
vital to the imagination of the kind of decentralization associated with global commerce. By decentralization, I wish to evoke the consequences of a small state that
minimizes intervention; however, my emphasis is not on the structure of British
society, but on the imagined geography of a borderless world and individual subjects’ refusal to anchor themselves in a homeland, physically and emotionally.14 The
capacity to represent decentered networks allowed literary works to critique and
embrace capitalism in original ways and to anticipate some characteristics of twentieth- and twenty-first-century globalization, from experiences of dispersion to the
fascination with dissolving borders.

Old Literary Genres, New Economic Principles
The depiction of the capitalist challenge to nationhood, I argue, relied on techniques
and tropes derived from romance tales. By romance, I refer specifically to a fictitious

narrative that “embod[ies] the adventures of some hero,” in which “the scene and
incidents are very remote from those of ordinary life” and “the story is often overlaid
with long disquisitions and digressions.”15 Familiar examples of the genre are The
Odyssey and Orlando Furioso. In modernity, romance motifs and character types
continue to thrive in various kinds of fiction, poetry, and drama. From John Keats’s
poems to Harlequin paperbacks, a wide range of texts host romance elements, so
much so that literary critics advocate the treatment of romance as a mode that
mutates within various genres.16 Consequently, my focus is not on romance as an
autonomous genre, but on dispersed romance elements that surface in nineteenthcentury British literature.
Romance elements have the capacity to represent free trade because they evoke
imaginary worlds in which prosaic modern features like state regulatory mechanisms are suspended. In romance tales, the hero leaves a centralized order (a palace,
the Round Table) to wander in lawless spaces (magic forests, boundless oceans).
While the court “anchors the narrative with an almost centripetal force,” writes Barbara Fuchs, the wandering hero’s adventures reveal spaces beyond the reach of that
force, where familiar laws do not hold: “the wandering of romance occurs during a
suspension of royal power and royal prerogatives, and of the individual’s duty to his
liege. . .  . Thus romance challenges the political mythmaking of epic, and its tight
networks of obligation and belonging.” The narrative structure of romance captures
the thematic tension between the centripetal and the centrifugal. Plots feature two


12

Romances of Free Trade

competing movements: a quest narrative and “constant detours from that quest.”
Through this dynamic structure, romance cultivates the “sense that its potentially
infinite digression and variety may be resistant to completion and authorial control.”17 This triumph of endless dispersion explains why literary tropes residual from
romance tales came to narrate the waning of import tariffs and duties in the nineteenth century. Centrifugal forms and themes capture the motion of commodities
under laissez-faire, conveying the core element of reification in capitalist modernity:
the widespread conviction that commodities disperse in ways that cannot be controlled.18 As we will see, through romance elements, nineteenth-century British literature associates free trade with the loss of discipline and order, which appears

dystopian at times and pleasurable at others.
I do not claim that capitalism and romance are intrinsically compatible. Their
seeming compatibility only follows from the peculiar vantage point from which
many Britons approached free trade. Economists who advocated individual freedom from governmental regulation seemed to offer a flexible alternative to the
rigidity of state organization and to the supremacy of the upper classes. If the state
is centralized in that “its divisions are formally coordinated with one another” and
all political activities “originate from it or refer to it,”19 free trade is multidirectional, with activity dispersed across numerous nodes. Like the nation-state, colonialism offers an inelastic structure: commodities move between two preset nodes,
the metropole and the colony. In contrast, free trade requires the burgeoning and
dissolution of spontaneous partnerships, shaped by fluctuations in price. The
romance emphasis on decentralization can aptly represent centrifugal forces
of capitalism, even though the experience of free trade by individual producers
and consumers has little to do with the exhilarating sense of liberty offered by
romance tales.
The most relevant romance element informing the representation of free trade
in nineteenth-century British literature is what Mikhail Bakhtin calls abstract space.
As he details, once romance protagonists leave centralized order behind, they move
into settings that are difficult to map. Bakhtin explains that romance adventures
typically take place in a peculiar “chronotope,” by which he means the narrative representation of time and space:
Abductions, escape, pursuit, search, and captivity all play an immense role in
the Greek romance. It, therefore, requires large spaces, land and seas,
different countries. The world of these romances is large and diverse. But the
size and diversity is utterly abstract. For a shipwreck one must have a sea, but
which particular sea (in the geographical and historical sense) makes no
difference at all.

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Introduction

13

Abstract space produces a certain kind of protagonist: “The world of the Greek
romance is an alien world: everything in it is indefinite, unknown, foreign. Its heroes
are there for the first time; they have no organic ties or relationships with it.”20
Romances thus feature settings and characters that contrast with realism’s relatively
orderly perspective and its socially embedded subjects.
Abstraction was particularly useful for describing what Marx called the “annihilation of space.” On the one hand, capitalism needs vast distances, for the market
must expand; on the other hand, this space must be annihilated in the sense that
“the time spent in motion from one place to another” must be reduced to a minimum.21 The swift transfer of goods maximizes profit, so paradoxically the key to
expansion across space is the elimination of distance. The annihilation of space finds
symbolic representation in abstract space; in fact, the capacity to capture spatial
compression partially underlies the critical role that the romance played in the narration of global capitalism. This is not to deny that realism could capture the increasingly globalized existence of British subjects in the nineteenth century. Realist
narrators’ detachment from what they observed inspired a model of ethical interaction with peoples of distant lands; realist portrayals of mores and customs fueled the
understanding that the world is comprised of different cultures; characters in realist
novels drifted around the world, with the growing emphasis on race—rather than
location—suggesting the portability of Anglo-Saxon power.22 What distinguished
the romance narration of global capitalism, then, was its imagination of departures
from centralized authority, which in turn evoked transformations in experiences in
space and the sense of belonging.
Romance tropes such as abstract settings and detached characters obviously
predated laissez-faire, but they acquired new significance after the birth of the economic paradigm that the government should not intervene in foreign commerce, I
argue. Solitary characters who are not organically integrated into any community,
and dreamlike settings that do not seem mappable, came to describe new kinds of
commercial exploits that blurred the distinction between the domestic and the foreign. Operating in conjunction with these characters and settings, episodic narration enhanced the emphasis on dispersion. The chronotope and narrative structure
of romance provided British literature with the capacity to represent antiauthoritarianism, disorientation, and decentralization, each of which addressed the conditions of global modernity.
Chronologically organized, my chapters trace nineteenth-century modes of
transnationality that grew out of the free trade paradigms and discuss the mediating
effects of romance elements. The two chapters following the introduction focus on
texts that locate the roots of transnational exchange in individualism. In these narratives, individual rebellion against protectionist laws produces deracinated subjects

14

Romances of Free Trade

who do not recognize the authority of the nation-state. Chapters 4 through 7 turn
to the friction between the individualist basis of capitalism and free traders’ emphasis on worldwide cooperation. Even as the cultural imaginary singled out radical
autonomy as the condition of transnationality, the liberals increasingly relied on the
rhetorical embrace of global sharing. How could autonomy and  interdependence
possibly go hand in hand? Pinpointing this predicament, literary works illuminated
the logic of free trade through figurative comparisons of free trade with a wide range
of relatively familiar activities and institutions, from marriage and sexual intimacy to
the luxuriant growth of vegetation and the spread of disease.
To begin to explore the individualist orientation of free trade and the articulation of it in the romance mode, in chapter 2 I turn to Walter Scott’s Waverley novels,
the series that provided perhaps the most prominent explorations of national identity and culture in the early nineteenth century. Scott’s thorough familiarity with
the Scottish Enlightenment, the school of philosophy that inspired the advocacy of
free trade in modern Britain, surfaces in his provocative treatment of commerce.
This chapter shows that through the figure of the smuggler, the Waverley novels
address key issues raised by liberal economists. Even though the Waverley novels are
set in the past, their representation of smuggling evokes the political controversies of
Scott’s own milieu. In the decades when Scott was composing his fiction, the contraband trade was political economists’ favorite trope for proving the inevitability of
circulation across national borders. James Mill, David Ricardo, and John Ramsey
McCulloch all evoked the prominence of smuggling in eighteenth-century England
to assert that protectionism was doomed to fail. However, as Scott was well aware,
the smuggler belonged as much to romance tales as to political economy: for centuries, smugglers embellished adventure tales of travel, captivity, and quest. In Guy
Mannering (1815) and Redgauntlet (1824), Scott ingeniously brought that literary
historical context to bear on economic debates. The detachment of smugglers, typical for romance figures, expresses the affective consequence of boundless circulation
in these novels: the inability to form bonds to national communities, as well as local
or familial ones. By using romance elements to represent laissez-faire, Scott initiated

a literary tradition that addressed the economy’s presumed challenge to the authority of the nation-state.
When popular novelist Captain Marryat took up the smuggler figure roughly a
decade later, he, too, explored affective detachment through it. Marryat’s novels,
which helped the genre of nautical fiction acquire tremendous popularity in the
1830s, are famous for their depictions of naval victories. However, in many of Marryat’s novels from The King’s Own (1830) to Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), naval sailors
disobey orders and deviate from preset paths to transport commodities. This is the
moment when the novels enter the romance mode, with sailors’ rebellious impulses

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