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

Romances of Free Trade British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century Ayşe Çelikkol 1... Romances of Free Trade 4 Concerns about the seemingly uncontrollable

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

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

For Öznur Ç elikkol and Ahmet Ç elikkol, my parents

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Contents

1 Introduction: Narrating Global Capitalism in the Romance Mode 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 Th e Compression of Space in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit 123

8 Epilogue: Cycles of Capitalist Expansion 143

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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 off ered 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 inspira-tion over the years as I worked on this book Betty Joseph always asked diffi cult 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, Th eresa Krier inspired me with her prose Daylanne Eng-lish, as chair, created many opportunities for me to conduct research and collect feedback from experts in the fi eld during the most critical years of my work on this book At Macalester, draft ing chapters in my offi ce 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

I concluded the manuscript at the institution where I fi rst discovered the ures of literary and cultural analysis—my undergraduate alma mater, Bilkent Uni-versity 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

Romances of Free Trade

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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 Th e Smuggler , a historical novel in which the public voraciously

consumes contraband goods James promised to off er 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 hol-lands  .  were things duly estimated by the British public, especially when they could be obtained without the payment of custom-house duties 1

Th is 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 Th e Smuggler —

obtaining foreign goods without the payment of customs duties—was becoming legal when James composed the novel In the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, liberal economists in Britain insisted that imports should not be subject to high duties or tariff s Th e economic system that they proposed limited the state’s ability

to control commodity traffi c across national borders and appeared to threaten ereignty for this reason

1

Introduction

Narrating Global Capitalism

in the Romance Mode

Romances of Free Trade 4

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 importa-tion 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 sover-eignty, just as pundits such as Thomas Friedman now warn Americans of a pre-sumably 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 sur-prising, 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 hypo-thetical 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 nonca-nonical ones such as John Lettsom Elliot, Th omas Serle, and Ebenezer Elliott—mapping abstract economic principles onto subjective experiences of community and space

Th is introduction fi rst briefl y charts economic developments that led to Britain’s partial abolishment of prohibitive duties on importation and exportation It subse-quently suggests that during the rise of free trade, literature and economic writing in

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 ele-ments 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 fi rst 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 modities 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 suff er, and the people would get poorer Th ough Adam

com-Smith’s Wealth of Nations provocatively suggested in 1776 that protectionism

bene-fi ted 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 “Th e 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 traffi c 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 Th e prospect of free trade may have initially inspired concerns about sovereignty, but its practice brought many distant

Romances of Free Trade 6

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’ interpre-tation of free trade as unpatriotic thus failed to predict the ways in which lower duties and tariff s would benefi t Britain However naive protectionists may have been in their inability to foresee the hegemonic uses of free trade, their concerns about com-modity 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 profi t continually under capitalism, markets must keep expanding; as a result, the circulation of commodities resists legal measures that aim to restrict their fl ow Reactions to proposed free trade policies in nineteenth- century Britain frequently displayed an implicit awareness of this dynamic

Th e 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 Th e 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 pam-phlet 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 fi nds 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 fi nd 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

Th e 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

Introduction 7

As the nineteenth century progressed, the mercantilist mode of colonialism became partly outdated Economic interventions by the metropole became less fash-ionable, with many champions of colonialism, from Th omas 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 distribu-tion in the colonies Th e 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 coff ee beans and cinnamon, and agricultural profi ts 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 commodi-ties: “Th e two leading imperial products of the 1830s, sugar and timber, as well as other important commodities such as coff ee, owed their position in the British mar-ket 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 mercantil-ist principles, it did not restrict state authority; for this reason, postcolonial criti-cism’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 compro-mise 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 his-toricizing twenty-fi rst-century meditations on the role of the nation-state amid increasingly globalized markets and corporations

To avoid oversimplifying notions of economic globalization, fi rst I wish to highlight that the emergence of the nation-state cannot be separated from the devel-opment of capitalism Th e latter needs the cultural homogeneity, the legal guaran-tees, 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 indefi nite 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 fl ow of capital 10 For example, chaos presided aft er the Dutch lost their global power in the eighteenth century, until capital became more concen-trated 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

Romances of Free Trade 8

Protectionist zeal waned through the early Victorian period, but the adoption of free trade measures was gradual and partial Th e 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 aft er 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 tariff s 11

Disanchored Subjects and Borderless Geographies

in Literature

Th e obvious medium for discussing free trade principles in nineteenth-century ain was political economy, the precursor to the modern science of economics Polit-ical economists discussed whether high-volume importation would drain gold reserves, how global competition would aff ect British manufacture, and which social class would benefi t 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? Th ese 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 low 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 signifi cance of human sensations 12 Th e 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

fol-of the nation-state’s secure economic and cultural borders As I examine the tions of economic writing and imaginative literature, I treat them as distinct dis-courses, given that in the nineteenth century what Mary Poovey calls “the break-up

intersec-Introduction 9

of the continuum of writing that mediated value” had already taken place, and ical economists claimed that their work constituted an autonomous branch of scien-tifi c 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 considera-tion now-forgotten texts by William Spence, David Robinson, Albert Williams, Edward Edwards, and Colonel Th ompson, 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 oft en describes a situation in which territorial boundaries are regularly transgressed, if not dissolved,

by economic, political, or artistic traffi c Even though the nineteenth century is ically 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 aft er the gradual adoption of free trade measures aft er the 1840s

typ-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 duced a kind of postnational ideal that threatened to undermine patriotic attach-ment to a homeland conceived in more paternalistic terms At stake in free trade was

pro-a trpro-ansformpro-ation in the function of the npro-ation-stpro-ate: the idepro-a thpro-at citizens would need protection from the vicissitudes of the economy was becoming extinct, along-side tariff s 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 Th e emergent global order,

it seemed, would hinge on this new kind of state, whose conception inspired gia for the more nationalist counterpart it was to replace

Unfettered by legal prohibitions or regulations, commodity traffi c would become uncontainable, volatile, random—so claimed opponents of free trade Amid eco-nomic controversy, Britons contemplated the eff ects of such traffi c How would vertiginous circulation restructure the individual experiences of communal belong-ing and spatial mobility? Literary works played a privileged role in addressing this question, because they had the capacity to off er imagined identities and spaces that bypassed the nation-state One of the earliest literary tropes for articulating the cri-sis of patriotism vis- à -vis capitalism was the smuggler Typically disloyal to the

Romances of Free Trade 10

homeland, this fi gure 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 signifi cance of smuggling was ironic: it is safe to assume that smugglers actually supported protectio nism, since without high duties there would be no use for contraband trade Beyond the fi gure of the smuggler, various kinds of fi ctional merchants boasted transnational identities Alternately detached from all national communities or in harmony with humanity as a whole, commer-cial magnates in the literary imagination possess enough power to domineer legisla-tors, 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 Th e fl ow of com-modities creates borderless spaces, which, devoid of national markers, call into ques-tion the very notion of homeland Natural and urban settings in which exchange networks fl ourish can each represent the apparent waning of state authority For example, the sublime power of the open seas draws attention to the limits of indi-vidual 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 terri-tory Flourishing in various genres from historical and nautical fi ction 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

Th e popular novelist Captain Marryat’s Snarleyyow, or the Dog Fiend (1837)

epitomizes the literary capacity to imagine transnationality during the rise of free trade, specifi cally in the form of disanchored subjects and borderless geographies A

nautical romance, Snarleyyow depicts unruly seamen of diverse national

back-grounds who deal commodities and defeat all state apparatuses designed to control commercial traffi c Operating in the open seas, their multinational community rec-ognizes no authority, be it that of a captain or the state Spontaneity and defi ance, if not anarchy, characterize the globalized existence of free-trading subjects in the dys-

topic 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 aff ective appeal of laissez-faire If commodities and merchants in this novel are always on the move, the structure of the novel replicates their disorderli-ness Sprawling and circular, the narrative matches the trajectories of the fi ctional commodities it depicts Th e romance penchant for episodic adventures becomes a formal corollary to the theme of uncontainable commerce

Introduction 11

As nineteenth-century British literature portrayed the loss of central authority,

it pinpointed structural and aff ective tensions between capitalism and the ideal of the bounded nation-state Th e literary capacity to address free trade debates was vital to the imagination of the kind of decentralization associated with global com-

merce 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 sub-jects’ refusal to anchor themselves in a homeland, physically and emotionally 14 Th e capacity to represent decentered networks allowed literary works to critique and embrace capitalism in original ways and to anticipate some characteristics of twenti-eth- and twenty-fi rst-century globalization, from experiences of dispersion to the fascination with dissolving borders

Old Literary Genres, New Economic Principles

Th e depiction of the capitalist challenge to nationhood, I argue, relied on techniques and tropes derived from romance tales By romance, I refer specifi cally to a fi ctitious 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 oft en overlaid with long disquisitions and digressions.” 15 Familiar examples of the genre are Th e Odyssey and Orlando Furioso In modernity, romance motifs and character types

continue to thrive in various kinds of fi ction, 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 nineteenth-century British literature

Romance elements have the capacity to represent free trade because they evoke imaginary worlds in which prosaic modern features like state regulatory mecha-nisms 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 Bar-bara 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  . .  Th us romance challenges the political mythmaking of epic, and its tight networks of obligation and belonging.” Th e narrative structure of romance captures the thematic tension between the centripetal and the centrifugal Plots feature two

Romances of Free Trade 12

competing movements: a quest narrative and “constant detours from that quest.”

Th rough this dynamic structure, romance cultivates the “sense that its potentially infi nite digression and variety may be resistant to completion and authorial con-trol.” 17 Th is triumph of endless dispersion explains why literary tropes residual from romance tales came to narrate the waning of import tariff s and duties in the nine-teenth century Centrifugal forms and themes capture the motion of commodities under laissez-faire, conveying the core element of reifi cation in capitalist modernity: the widespread conviction that commodities disperse in ways that cannot be con-trolled 18 As we will see, through romance elements, nineteenth-century British lit-erature 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 Th eir seeming compatibility only follows from the peculiar vantage point from which many Britons approached free trade Economists who advocated individual free-dom from governmental regulation seemed to off er a fl exible 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 multidirec-tional, with activity dispersed across numerous nodes Like the nation-state, colo-nialism off ers 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 fl uctuations in price Th e 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 off ered by romance tales

Th e 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 diffi cult to map Bakhtin explains that romance adventures typically take place in a peculiar “chronotope,” by which he means the narrative rep-resentation 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, diff erent countries Th e 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 diff erence at all

Introduction 13

Abstract space produces a certain kind of protagonist: “Th e world of the Greek romance is an alien world: everything in it is indefi nite, unknown, foreign Its heroes are there for the fi rst 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 lation 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

“annihi-“the time spent in motion from one place to another” must be reduced to a mum 21 Th e swift transfer of goods maximizes profi t, so paradoxically the key to expansion across space is the elimination of distance Th e annihilation of space fi nds symbolic representation in abstract space; in fact, the capacity to capture spatial compression partially underlies the critical role that the romance played in the nar-ration of global capitalism Th is is not to deny that realism could capture the increas-ingly globalized existence of British subjects in the nineteenth century Realist narrators’ detachment from what they observed inspired a model of ethical interac-tion with peoples of distant lands; realist portrayals of mores and customs fueled the understanding that the world is comprised of diff erent cultures; characters in realist novels drift ed 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 signifi cance aft er the birth of the eco-nomic 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 for-eign Operating in conjunction with these characters and settings, episodic narra-tion enhanced the emphasis on dispersion Th e chronotope and narrative structure

of romance provided British literature with the capacity to represent tarianism, disorientation, and decentralization, each of which addressed the condi-tions 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 eff ects of romance elements Th e two chapters following the introduction focus on texts that locate the roots of transnational exchange in individualism In these narra-tives, individual rebellion against protectionist laws produces deracinated subjects

Romances of Free Trade 14

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’ sis 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 fi gurative comparisons of free trade with a wide range

empha-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 tion 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 iden-tity 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

articula-Th is chapter shows that through the fi gure 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 fi ction, the contra-band 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 centu-

ries, 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 Th e detachment of smugglers, cal for romance fi gures, expresses the aff ective consequence of boundless circulation

typi-in these novels: the typi-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 ity of the nation-state

When popular novelist Captain Marryat took up the smuggler fi gure roughly a decade later, he, too, explored aff ective detachment through it Marryat’s novels, which helped the genre of nautical fi ction acquire tremendous popularity in the 1830s, are famous for their depictions of naval victories However, in many of Marr-

yat’s novels from Th e King’s Own (1830) to Mr Midshipman Easy (1836), naval sailors

disobey orders and deviate from preset paths to transport commodities Th is is the moment when the novels enter the romance mode, with sailors’ rebellious impulses

Introduction 15

liberating them from their military and colonial obligations to the state Ensuing adventures take place in what Bakhtin calls abstract space, with the wide seas consti-tuting an amorphous space located outside the purview of the nation-state Chapter 3 shows that these seafaring adventures created a new category of national enemy that coexisted with traditional ones such as France and Holland: multinational commu-nities comprised of unruly sailors who mix and mingle mirthfully aboard their ships Transporting commodities in ways that violate laws governing importation and exportation, Marryat’s reckless sailors express the antiauthoritarian sentiments that surface frequently in economic writing Th e thematic representation of antiauthori-tarianism matches the narrator’s long digressions in these adventures, with episodic narrative structure replicating the uncontainable circulation that characterizes free trade Animated by the confl ict between military discipline and unfettered sponta-neity, Marryat’s fi ction reveals the role that individualism played in shaping nine-teenth-century visions of transnationality

While the romance fi gure of the seafarer ascribed radical autonomy to agents of global capitalism, liberal economic writing frequently hailed free trade as the epit-ome of cooperation among classes within a nation, as well as among the nations of the world To examine critiques and espousals of global interdependence, in chap-ters 4 through 7 , I examine literary tropes that confl ate commerce with emotional and intellectual exchange Chapter 4 begins to explore dreams of worldwide har-mony as it focuses on one of Harriet Martineau’s economic tales, which communi-cated economic principles by conveying stories of fi ctional lives In “Dawn Island,” she employs fertility as a metaphor for commercial expansion, following the femini-zation of free trade in economic propaganda Popular circulars of the Anti-Corn-Law League likened commodity circulation to the propagation of sun rays and the

fl ow of air; similarly, Martineau likens free trade to plant growth on the basis that both replace geographical partitioning with continuity Th e romance setting of this tale is a lush, primeval island beyond the reach of modernity I argue that the mythi-cal island not only presents borderless space but also helps to imagine a world in which nation-states do not exist Th e primordial setting renders the modern nation-state’s careful policing of its borders temporarily forgettable

As Martineau’s fi gurative use of fertility suggests, metaphors of sexuality vided rich meditations on global capitalism In her liberal vision, the fi gure of a pregnant woman immersing herself in vast stretches of twining plants evoked free trade, but skeptics of laissez-faire instead compared the duty-free fl ow of commodi-ties with sexual promiscuity, suggesting the immorality of commercial intercourse with unfamiliar parties from distant lands Chapter 5 examines plays in which sexu-

pro-ality provides a language for critiquing unrestricted circulation: Th e Ghost Story

(1836) and Five to Two (1851), by playwrights Th omas Serle and John Lettsom Elliot,

Romances of Free Trade 16

respectively Serle was popular in theatrical circles, while Elliot remained obscure as

a playwright—he was better known for the economic pamphlets he authored before turning to drama Th ose conservative pamphlets subtly employed sexual metaphors, describing free traders’ political meetings as if they were hedonistic orgies How-ever, metaphorical comparisons of sexual hedonism and free trade fl ourished more powerfully in literature—especially in notoriously bawdy early Victorian plays—because the plots of amorous adventures structurally resemble free trade Th e thrill

of romance (in the overlapping senses of adventure tale and amorous relationship) lies in the prolongation of fl irtation Th e deferral of closure in the plays I investigate matches the endlessness of commercial circulation, thus rendering narratable the abstract economic principles of free trade

Th e question of whether a fundamentally competitive economic system could foster cooperative relations among nations—and individuals—plays a key role in canonical Victorian fi ction as well Chapters 6 and 7 , respectively, focus on works by Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens in which the theme of commerce tackles dreams and failures of global harmony Brontë’s interest in issues of international

commerce shaped her posthumously published fi rst novel, Th e Professor (composed

1846), in which a free trader’s cosmopolitanism clashes with patriotic sentiment By

the time Brontë returned to the topic in Shirley (1849), the Corn Laws had been repealed In Shirley , the characters’ dialogues evoke the Anti-Corn-Law League’s

rhetoric on the Luddite riots Th e novel’s Belgian-born exporter of cotton, for ple, blames his workers’ uprisings on government-imposed prohibitions on exporta-tion He even gradually comes to treat marriage as the domestic corollary of commercial reciprocity, but women’s experiences in the novel call this judgment into question As he grows into a suitable lover, qualities that become a romance hero—enthusiasm about armed confl ict, emotional intensity, the desire to save others—replace his former insipidity Examining this transformation, chapter 6 shows that even as Brontë’s fi ction stressed the present dreariness of industrial capitalism, it conjured up an idealized mode of commerce whose capacity to overcome barriers evoked the courageous exploits of romance heroes

Chapter 7 turns to Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–1857) to investigate the

persistence of the romance narration of free trade in mid-Victorian fi ction Famous

for its depiction of imprisonment, Little Dorrit focuses on boundaries and their

transgression I argue that the representation of enclosure and circulation in this novel replicates the language of economic debates on Sino-British commerce and the Opium Wars, issues Dickens covered in his journalism However claustropho-bic imprisonment may be, the defi ance of boundaries itself becomes a nightmare as the novel’s business tycoon and international blackmailer acquire an eerie ubiq-

uity Even though Little Dorrit is a novel with highly psychologized characters and

Introduction 17

elaborate social webs, these realist conventions are interrupted by the narration of merchants’ radical mobility, with alternative techniques inherited from romances taking over In the Gothic blackmail subplot, disorienting spaces counter the rational, centra lized perspective off ered by realist narration Th e blackmailer, like the business tycoon, is—in his own words—“here and there and everywhere” simultaneously Th rough romance elements, Dickens off ers a remarkably early imagination of what Marx described as time-space compression, the chaotic expe-rience of space under capitalism

Literary criticism’s focus on contexts in which romance presents an alternative

to capitalist modernity has obscured the romance fi guration of free trade Th e Romantics famously constructed imaginative alternatives to urban spaces fi lled with factory smoke, even though they simultaneously validated political economy’s autonomous subject 23 Later in the century, the genre of imperial romance enacted a comparable dynamic In this genre, the romance mode takes over when protagonists travel outside Europe, to the east or the south, reaffi rming the commonplace notion that Western modernity was devoid of enchantment Exploring such contexts, liter-ary criticism has addressed the ways in which romance alleviates the ills of capitalism

by countering the oppressive reign of the rational and asserting the power of nation 24 Even as materialist a critic as Fredrick Jameson has off ered an uncharacter-istically Romantic approach to the topic, fi nding in late-nineteenth-century fi ction

imagi-a return to the comforting myth of heroism 25 Standing apart from such tions is that of Ian Duncan, who has shown that the romance emphasis on individual power in many ways befi ts and refl ects modern selfh ood 26 Following Duncan’s lead,

Romances of Free Trade demonstrates that the congruence of romance and

moder-nity extends beyond the former’s crystallization of bourgeois privacy driven chronotopes and narrative structures express and evaluate such characteristics

Romance-of advanced capitalism as fl uidity and volatility, as well as capturing transformations

of the relationship between the state and the individual subject

As I suggest through a sustained coverage of issues of gender and sexuality in multiple chapters, the nineteenth-century eff ort to scrutinize the emergent free-market economy relied heavily upon existing discourses on gender and sexuality Of course, capitalism was already being mediated through discourses of gender before the emergence of laissez-faire In the eighteenth century, critics of capitalist expan-sion continually described the consumption of luxury items as inherently feminine, suggesting that the interest in imported goods was a weakness In the meantime, capitalist ideology invented new perceptions of consumption, according to which the decision to purchase goods resembled the operation of erotic desire Aft er liberal economists began to oppose mercantilism, I argue, deployments of sexuality in capi-talist ideology entered a new phrase, in which representations of the female body

Romances of Free Trade 18

explored the stakes of what one political economist called “boundless commerce.” 27

Th e dangers of individual liberty were mapped onto the fi gure of the promiscuous woman just as the rewards of commerce between nations could be metaphorically translated into marital mutuality Gender played such an important role in the eff ort

to comprehend global capitalism because laissez-faire inspired fears of the erosion of the paternalist state By defi nition, paternalist ideology had likened the role of the state to that of the father in the domestic space Consequently, the perceived eco-nomic threat to governance and sovereignty seemed to run the risk of destabilizing patriarchal authority, rendering women’s bodies central to discursive negotiations of national sovereignty defi ned over and against self-regulating markets

Liberal Individualism and Dreams of Global Solidarity

My argument regarding the literary imagination of the transnational contributes to

an ongoing discussion in literary criticism about the relation between nationhood and literature—and, more specifi cally, between nationhood and the novel One side

of this debate asserts that the novel facilitated the rise of the nation-state in modern times Calling attention to the fact that the rise of the novel coincides with that of the nation-state, scholars assert the inherent compatibility of the novel with nation-alism 28 In response to these theories, many literary critics have begun to argue that the novel is a transnational form Th ese critics focus on the ways in which the fl ow of ideas, texts, and persons across national borders shaped the structure of the novel 29 Scholars who disagree about whether the novel is a national or transnational form in fact have common political concerns, since the critique of nationalism informs both sides of the debate Th ose who treat the novel as inherently nationalistic do so to expose the processes through which nationhood was constructed and to stress that nations are not naturally occurring communities Th ose who assert the transnational character of the novel are similarly critical of the goals and ends of nationhood Th ey reveal that territorial borders can never contain the circulation of ideas, art, and peo-ples, and they frequently perform the act of border crossing that they examine Employing transnational methodology, they refuse to limit their analysis to the liter-ary production of a single nation and embrace the novel for its capacity to resist nationalist ideologies 30

Given that nationalism presupposes and imposes homogeneity, 31 the critique of nationhood and the cultivation of transnational perspectives are without doubt invaluable intellectual projects However, the critical viewpoint that motivates my discussion of the transnational is diff erent Rather than critiquing nationhood—however necessary that may be—I wish to highlight that transnationality was in

Introduction 19

many ways rooted in capitalist modes of organization Economic liberalism loomed large in early visions of the global, valorizing autonomy and “free” choice as key ele-ments in the production of subjects who would frequently travel across porous national borders

Th e role that individualism historically played in imagining alliances across national borders and challenging the sovereignty of the nation-state has received lit-tle attention so far, perhaps because so many studies of nineteenth-century alterna-tives to nationalism have centered on cosmopolitanism, the sense of belonging to and serving a worldwide community of human beings 32 In perhaps the most detailed examination of cosmopolitanism in nineteenth-century Britain, Amanda Anderson astutely locates in cosmopolitan philosophy the roots of modern detachment, but she does not focus on the problems and paradoxes of autonomous subjectivity 33 If

we emphasize cosmopolitanism in the sense of utopian world citizenship, as recent criticism has also tended to do, we elude the centrality of liberal economic values such as individual liberty and market competition to the imagination of global interconnection 34 Discussing “globalization’s Victorian antecedents,” Lauren M E Goodlad asserts that “from a Victorian perspective, the word ‘cosmopolitan’ was more likely to evoke the impersonal structures of capitalism and imperialism than an ethos of tolerance, world-citizenship, or multiculturalism.” Like Goodlad, I main-tain that the eff ort to historicize globalization must address the unique economic theories and practices of the nineteenth century 35 I am suggesting that we discuss the ideology of free trade along with cosmopolitanism to chart Britons’ perception

of the world and their place in it in the nineteenth century

Even though free traders claimed to pursue global solidarity, the individualist premise of transnational exchange in early- and mid-nineteenth-century Britain stood in tension with Enlightenment cosmopolitanism Philosophers from David Hume to Immanuel Kant had argued that commerce would foster peace and solidar-ity among people from around the world To be sure, their commitment to the

“brotherhood of men” and the nineteenth-century liberals’ pursuit of the freedom

to trade have common roots Enlightenment philosophers who envisioned people living in peaceful harmony around the world were reacting against the tyranny of absolutist states Taking up the Enlightenment legacy via Adam Smith, political economists who opposed government intervention and condemned the exercise of unrestricted power by the state similarly opposed despotic absolutism However, with class confl ict becoming increasingly visible in urban industrialization and call-ing into question the possibility of social harmony, the pursuit of global interde-pendence through the exercise of individual freedom appeared increasingly problematic in the nineteenth century Whereas Adam Smith had off ered an opti-mistic vision of the world in which the pursuit of self-interest ultimately improves

Romances of Free Trade 20

society as a whole, in the nineteenth century, David Ricardo and Th omas Malthus provided a bleaker vision of society in which commercial interests are generally antagonistic Th ese infl uential writers suggested that self-interest and cooperation were not easily reconcilable Amid waning optimism about the harmony of interests,

it was harder to reconcile the longing for the individual freedom to trade with dreams of global interdependence 36

If Enlightenment philosophers treated commerce as key to peaceful order in the world, in nineteenth-century economic and literary writing, the circulation of com-modities seemed capable of unhinging worldwide chaos, precisely because free trade signaled the triumph of individual liberty Not that the association of global mobil-ity with disarray was peculiar to the nineteenth century: the eighteenth century was marked by various kinds of “planetary consciousness,” and “the confusion of bound-aries created by complex transnational wars, trade patterns, and fi nance markets” challenged the Enlightenment’s confi dence in surveying and mapping the world 37

Th e nineteenth century introduced additional concerns about the function of the state, which under laissez-faire would no longer counter markets’ unpredictability

or rein in individual whims During the rise of free trade, romance elements in inative literature articulated fears and fantasies of transnational alliance and cap-tured the appeal of the nation-state as a protective power keeping the chaos of capitalist exchange at bay

Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, which deal with the political histories of Scotland and England in the eighteenth century, provided perhaps the most prom-inent explorations of national identity and culture in early-nineteenth-century Britain Focused on the emergence of a British national identity aft er the union of kingdoms, these novels may seem unlikely sites for launching an argument about the compromise of bounded national communities and literary responses to nine-teenth-century economic debates on foreign commerce However, the Waverley novels persistently locate the question of national identity, be it Scottish, English,

or British, in the contexts of international alliance, multinational community, and border-crossing commerce Th e Scottish Enlightenment’s emphasis on commerce between distant lands and Scott’s deep knowledge of that school of philosophy underlie rich representations of nationhood, as well as its alternatives, in the Waverley novels

In the eighteenth century, one of the major fi gures of the Scottish ment, David Hume, asserted that irrational feelings of animosity that the members

Enlighten-of one nation habitually feel for those Enlighten-of another hinder benefi cial commercial ties For Hume, the advent of global commerce would ensure peace in the world by coun-tering nationalist prejudices 1 Later in the eighteenth century, this notion of global harmony was taken up by another prominent philosopher of the Scottish Enlight-

enment, Adam Smith Decades aft er the publication of Smith’s Wealth of Nations ,

when the Corn Laws severely restricted the importation of grain in 1815, Smith’s followers evoked his work to prove the necessity of international commerce 2 How-ever, free trade had become a harder sell in the meantime, as the optimism of the

2

Walter Scott’s Disloyal Smugglers

Romances of Free Trade

2 2

Enlightenment had become relatively outdated Th e greatest economic versy in Britain in the early-nineteenth century, the debate between David Ricardo and Th omas Malthus, exemplifi es this shift Mutually oppositional as Ricardo’s and Malthus’s theories were, they both asserted that harmonious growth was not quite as possible as Smith supposed Further, while Smith was more grounded in agricultural capitalism, political economists of the early-nineteenth century wit-nessed rapid industrial development Rendering the plight of the poor increasingly visible in urban environments, industrial capitalism made it more difficult to believe in Hume’s and Smith’s dreams of harmony At the same time, the increas-ingly infl uential free trade movement of the fi rst half of the nineteenth century appropriated Enlightenment rhetoric, and the liberals continued to claim that international commerce would serve the interests of all nations at once and ensure global harmony

In this chapter and the next, I investigate the infl ection of Enlightenment notions of global commerce (the transcendence of nationalist prejudice, the goal of limitless exchange) by nineteenth-century free traders’ emphasis on individual free-dom from government intervention If capitalism was centered on individual incentive, how could it become the basis of worldwide interconnection and soli-darity? To be sure, the valorization of the individual was implicit in Enlightenment philosophy, but early-nineteenth-century political economy helped to construe the autonomous rational subject, as I will discuss Th e economic emphasis on self-reli-ance rendered the individual’s connection to others problematic, as Charles Dick-ens’s Mr Bounderby, so autonomous as to pretend he never had maternal care, reminds us My analysis of the novels of Walter Scott and his disciple, Captain Mar-ryat, in this chapter and the next shows that dreams of self-reliance paradoxically informed the imagination of limitless exchange and global cooperation in nineteenth- century Britain

I examine Scott’s smugglers to address the literary imagination of transnational selfh ood during heated free trade debates Key to my argument is the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understanding that smugglers are underground practi-

tioners of free trade I focus especially on Guy Mannering (1815) and Redgauntlet

(1824), in which smugglers who secretly transport commodities from continental Europe to Scotland and England avoid customs-house duties and violate prohibi-tions on importation, betraying the government in doing so Perhaps more severe than their disobedience to the crown is their disloyalty to the masters and friends whom they pretend to respect and like Th e chronic disloyalty and detachment of the smuggler fi gure, I argue, represent the radical autonomy of the individual in an economic system in which commodities circulate without limits and transgress all boundaries that stand in the way Smugglers’ status as romance figures, which

Walter Scott’s Disloyal Smugglers 23

underlies their detachment, is crucial to my argument To initiate my argument about the narration of global commerce in the romance mode, I attend to the ways

in which romance elements express the individualist impulse behind free trade

Th e chronic detachment of smugglers is a trope inherited from older romances, yet comes to fi gure emergent economic principles Th e solitary existence of the romance smuggler, I argue, comments on the peculiar condition resulting from the triumph of free trade and the perceived decline in the sovereignty of the nation-state

The Smuggler in Political Economy

Th e indomitable smuggler enjoyed as prominent a presence in political economy

as it did in romance tales Guy Mannering intimates why the smuggler fi gure

played an important role in economic writing Scottish aristocrat Mr Bertram hails smugglers as “free-traders, whom the law calls smugglers,” implying that if

only Britain fully adopted laissez-faire, smuggling would no longer be a crime ( G ,

29) In dubbing smugglers free traders, Mr Bertram follows contemporary matic language: smugglers were commonly called free traders in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain 3 Implicit in the association of smuggling with free trade was the understanding that in the absence of the freedom to import, the practice of free trade had to go underground In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the dubbing of smuggling as free trade informed political economic discourse that addressed the benefi ts and detriments of government-imposed prohibitions on importation, such as those instated by the infamous Corn Laws Both opponents and proponents of laissez-faire recognized smuggling

idio-as an unfaltering, albeit illegal, act of free trade, even idio-as they idio-ascribed competing values to its persistence Th rough references to smuggling in treatises and periodi-cals, liberals celebrated the indomitable spirit of commercial activity while con-servatives condemned it for introducing iniquity into an otherwise peaceful and moral country

Th e work that established political economy as a distinct branch of social and

scientifi c inquiry, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations , relied on the fi gure of the

smug-gler to demonstrate that governmental interference in international commerce was futile Writing in the heyday of smuggling, Smith reminded his readers that “mutual restraints have put an end to almost all fair commerce between [Britain and France], and smugglers are now the principal importers, either of British goods into France,

or of French goods into Great Britain.” As he stressed, when governments ited or restricted importation, smugglers ensured the survival of free trade Th e

prohib-Romances of Free Trade

2 4

so-called protectionist measures that attempted to isolate the domestic economy were doomed to fail As long as a commodity was scarce in one country but not in another, “no vigilance of government” could prevent its exportation, and “all the sanguinary laws of the customs” could not stop its importation 4 Th e inevitability of circulation across national borders testifi ed to the immutability of the laws of econ-omy, which always asserted themselves, as if the famous invisible hand were directing all economic transactions Smugglers, who obeyed putatively universal economic laws even as they disobeyed the government, constituted a fl esh-and-blood corollary

to the invisible hand and reifi ed the abstract laws that Smith claimed to reveal For Smith, as capacious a category as that of the smuggler, which included wealthy merchants as well as working-class sailors, could unproblematically represent the strength of global capitalism because free trade putatively served the interests of all classes at once

Smith’s followers in the nineteenth century similarly turned to smuggling to assert the impossibility of breaking the global supply-and-demand circle As contro-versies over free trade intensifi ed during the Corn Law debates of the 1810s and 1820s, essayists, economists, and politicians referred to smuggling both to claim the inevitability of global circulation and to condemn the urge to import 5 John Ramsey

McCulloch, whose articles in the Edinburgh Review helped popularize David

Ricar-do’s theories, described smuggling as a form of commerce that the laws of supply and demand necessitated under protectionism: “Whenever the duties on commodities are raised beyond a certain limit, their eff ect is to render them less productive than

if they had been lower, either by diminishing consumption, or by encouraging and promoting the consumption of such as are smuggled.” Protectionist David Robin-son similarly treated smuggling as a kind of free trade, but with the express purpose

of refuting the claims of McCulloch and other liberals: “If there be any truth in the doctrines of the Economists, this smuggling of French silks ought to have benefi ted the Silk Trade, and our other trades, greatly.” 6 His opposition to free trade acquired

an empiricist basis through such examples because, thanks to the contraband trade, one could assume that the practice of free trade predated the freedom to trade Even

as actual smugglers virtually disappeared toward the end of the eighteenth century due to enhanced law enforcement, the smuggler figure achieved a ubiquitous presence in the rapidly developing and increasingly prominent field of political economy 7

Inhabiting a milieu when economic controversies frequently focused on duties and tariff s, Scott attended closely to international trade What is of interest for my purposes is not so much the question of whether he opposed free trade but rather his continual consideration of importation and exportation in relation to national power and international politics At the University of Edinburgh, where he was

Walter Scott’s Disloyal Smugglers 25

exposed to Enlightenment thought, works by Dugald Stewart and Smith, both of whom produced lasting theories of commerce, “formed Scott’s mind.” While Scott is said to have absorbed their “fi rm belief in ‘progress’ from feudal to com-mercial civilization,” his ideas on commerce did not always coincide with theirs 8

As early as the 1790s, Scott belonged to the highly conservative Speculative ety that featured discussions in favor of the Corn Laws, and it is safe to assume he agreed with the protectionist position of the club His attitude seems to have changed, however, in the aft ermath of the Napoleonic blockade that attempted to cut off Britain’s economic ties to the rest of the world In a letter to Joanna Baillie,

Soci-he celebrated international commerce and perhaps even favored tSoci-he repeal of tSoci-he Corn Laws in response to the blockade: “We hope, however, that things will not

be so bad as we anticipated some time since  . .  Th e opening of the [Continental] ports for importation has had a great eff ect in setting the looms agoing at Glas-gow and elsewhere, for the continental merchants are willing enough to take our commodities, only they have no money to pay for them, unless by our buying their corn.” 9 Th e position of the young Scott appears to contradict that of his mature self insofar as importation is concerned, but his protectionism and oppo-sition to the blockade both subordinate economic policy to the pursuit of national prowess

Similar ideological ambiguities surface in Life of Napoleon Buonaparte , where

Scott echoes extensively the Enlightenment views on international commerce to criticize the Napoleonic embargo and simultaneously reaffi rms the anti–free trade emphasis on national self-suffi ciency Appropriating the famous Enlighten-ment characterization of international commerce as the facilitator of world peace, Scott dubs commerce “the silken tie which binds nations together, whose infl u-ence is so salutary to all states.” He embraces expansive commercial intercourse, whose emphasis on liberty foils Napoleonic oppression, as a peculiarly British phenomenon At the same time, he subtly idealizes the self-suffi ciency so promi-nent in Tory calls for economic isolation: “Great Britain’s prosperity mainly rests

on her commerce, but her existence as a nation is not absolutely dependent upon it.” 10 He treats circuits of exchange diff erently outside the context of contempo-rary British nationhood, recognizing them as agents of cultural change rather than as threats to autonomy In an essay on the ancient history of Scotland, for example, aft er noting that “Caledonians carried on any such commerce as they possessed by means of the ports of Low Countries,” Scott speculates that they

“augment[ed] their population by emigrations from those Belgic shores” during periods of commercial intercourse He observes that commerce-driven emigra-tions caused a “stream of German blood” to “infuse  .  into [Caledonians’] Celtic veins.” Ascribing to commerce the power to introduce cultural as well as racial

Romances of Free Trade 26

hybridity, he notes that Caledonians’ frequent intercourse with Scandinavians who were “commencing their piratical incursions” caused the union of the two tongues 11 When we turn from Scott’s nonfi ction to his novels, we similarly encoun-ter border-crossing commerce as both creator of contact zones and threat to national autonomy

Economies of Loyalty and Detachment in Guy Mannering

In the aft ermath of the Union Act of 1707 that abolished the Scottish parliament, antiunion sentiment fueled the practice of smuggling in Scotland As the narrator

of Th e Heart of Midlothian (1818) explains, the Scots rebelled against English laws

that restricted their freedom to trade: “Smuggling was almost universal in land in the reigns of George I and II., for the [Scottish] people, unaccustomed to imposts, and regarding them as an unjust aggression upon their ancient liberties, made no scruple to elude them whenever it was possible to do so.” 12 Prior to the union, the Scots traded relatively freely with continental Europe; in its immediate aft ermath, they resented the protectionist English laws that were imposed on them In the course of the eighteenth century, smuggling declined, along with resentment for the Union Act, so the prominence of smuggling in Scott’s fi ction underlines the historicity of his settings At the same time, smuggling metaphori-cally represents a preference for the distant over the local Consider a telling scene

Scot-in Redgauntlet , Scot-in which a blScot-ind fi ddler named Willie curses upon hearScot-ing a faScot-int

sound of music on his way to a country dance: “Th e whoreson fi sher rabble—they have brought another violer upon my walk—they are such smuggling blackguards, that they must run in their very music.” 13 Condemning smuggling as an act of betrayal, Blind Willie’s metaphor constructs a topography of loyalty that evokes a wide range of political and economic issues, such as feudal kinship and global exchange

Th e distinction I have drawn so far between the contraband trade as historical referent, where it represents an indomitable Scottish spirit, and smuggling as meta-phor, where it signifi es the loss of the distinction between the local and the distant,

is oversimplifying, even though it alerts us to the rich matrix of meaning in which the smuggler fi gure operates Although Scottish antiunion sentiment is distinct from cosmopolitan nonchalance for the homeland, we should recognize the historically contingent overlap between the two Aft er all, antiunion sentiment appears nationalist only if the point of reference is the Scottish nation rather than the British Because Scott’s retrospective gaze locates the emergence of Britishness

at the root of economic and cultural progress in Scotland, the Waverley novels

Walter Scott’s Disloyal Smugglers 27

privilege British nationhood even as they nostalgically narrate Scottish manners and traditions From the teleological nineteenth-century perspective they repre-sent, the eighteenth-century pursuit of Scottish independence, such as that under-taken by the Jacobites, constitutes a threat to the very nation that Scott and his audience identifi ed as their own Jacobitism thus ideologically parallels threats to the British nation that originated from outside Britain

Th e alignment of Jacobitism with the foreign is as historical as it is ideological

Th e Jacobites’ religious and political ties to the Continent ascribed a transnational character to the pursuit of Scottish independence, which surfaces both linguisti-cally and thematically in the Waverley novels As the widespread practice of smuggling suggests, transnational alliances signifi ed and enabled opposition to the London government beyond Jacobite activity as well Many Scottish people opted

to trade with their long-standing commercial partners in France and the Baltic states instead of forming new partnerships with the English under the Union Act 14 Ethnic solidarity and cosmopolitan exchange thus historically converged through their mutual resistance to the authority of the consolidated nation-state, as they do through the multiple signifi cances of smuggling in Scott’s imagination Th e repre-sentation of the global free market through the smuggler fi gure, then, does not so much contradict that fi gure’s association with antiunion sentiment as express the ideological complexity of Scottish nationalism In the past few decades, literary criticism has convincingly demonstrated that Scott traces and celebrates the tri-umph of a consolidated British identity over an ethnically pure Scottish identity 15 However, as fi ctional smugglers and the controversial cargoes they transport begin

to reveal, it is not only ethnic unity that precedes and threatens centralized British nationhood in Scott’s fi ction Transnational economic and cultural networks desta-bilize British nationhood as well, ironically deeming unpatriotic those topographies

of exchange that were to boost Britain’s political and economic power by the nineteenth century

Smuggling as metaphor, which indicates the dissolution of local attachments, evokes early-nineteenth-century economic debates in which opponents of free trade declared the sale and consumption of foreign goods unpatriotic As my introductory discussion of protectionist rhetoric addressed, free trade was deeply controversial, because the availability of duty-free imports appeared to undermine commercial activity within Britain and its imperial network Th e respective merits and disadvan-tages of free trade and protectionism were under intense scrutiny in the early nine-teenth century by liberals such as James Mill, as well as conservatives such as William Spence Th e contentious topic owed its prominence to Smith’s eighteenth-century attack on the existing protectionist colonial system, in which he asserted that the system exclusively served the interest of merchants:

Romances of Free Trade 28

A great empire has been established for the sole purpose of raising up a nation

of customers who should be obliged to buy from the shops of our diff erent producers, all the goods with which these could supply them For the sake of that little enhancement of price which this monopoly might aff ord our pro-ducers, the home-consumers have been burdened with the whole expense of maintaining and defending that empire 16

Smith’s rhetorically strategic critique of the colonial system emphasizes patriotic concern for Britons’ own welfare For Smith, the solution to the inherently inequi-table protectionist system reliant on the monopoly of commercial entities such as the East India Company was a global free market system in which British merchants had no more incentive to bring goods from India, Canada, or other colonized terri-tories than from continental nations

Th e debate between the supporters of the two competing economic systems intensifi ed during the Napoleonic Wars Economic discussions involved a process

of cognitive mapping in which foreignness and distance did not always correspond

to one another A commodity from Canada that crossed the Atlantic counted as domestic, but one from France, which only crossed the narrow Channel, was for-eign According to one of free trade’s foremost opponents, William Spence, con-suming Indian goods was patriotic while coveting continental ones was treasonous Spence was able to boast of his country’s self-suffi ciency because he viewed colonial trade as an embodiment, rather than violation, of self-suffi ciency He wrote in 1808 that “[Britain’s] riches, her greatness, and her power, are wholly derived from sources within herself, and are entirely and altogether independent of her trade.” Th e pre-sumed evidence for this claim is telling: “Th e most important of [some] essential articles, our colonies and possessions in diff erent parts of the world off er us an abundant supply Th e forests of Canada, as well as of India, abound in the timber necessary for our ships of war.” 17 From this point of view, colonialism is patriotic because the colony reaffi rms, however paradoxically, the nation’s self-suffi ciency From the perspective of free market opponents who deemed importation detri-mental to domestic and colonial commerce, smugglers not only broke fi nancial laws but also violated patriotic codes Th e existence of commodity circulation across international borders upset the topography of loyalty delineated by nationalism and imperialism

Although colonial imperialism historically contributed to the establishment of global free market capitalism, its rhetoric relied heavily on the mobilization of loyalty As far as the sense of loyalty was concerned, the protectionist colonialism

of early-nineteenth-century Britain resembled feudalism, not the free market omy in which market prices, rather than kinships or friendships, determine who

econ-Walter Scott’s Disloyal Smugglers 29

buys what In fact, as I will explore in chapter 5 , these older principles of colonial trade were exactly what a new generation of imperialists such as Th omas Babington Macaulay and Harriet Martineau would later attack Th e central novelistic confl ict

in Guy Mannering reveals that loyalty constituted a paradigm around which various

distinct economic systems (preindustrial feudal networks of agricultural and artisan production, as well as the two distinct modes of global capitalism—protectionist colonialism and free trade) were organized Characters in this novel divide into two camps: those who bank on economies of attachment and those who bank on economies of detachment With each group vying for domination over the other, the confl ict that drives the suspenseful plot enacts the competition between the free market system and the alternatives to it

At the root of the confl ict are the ruthless exploits of the novel’s Dutch gler, Dirk Hattaraick Th e metaphorical signifi cance of smuggling as disloyalty,

smug-which Redgaunlet ’s Blind Willie so succinctly captures, fi nds an earlier expression in

Hattaraick, who, like the villagers Blind Willie curses, fails to develop attachments

He has no friends, religious faith, or family As the plot unfolds, he betrays the munity that consumes his smuggled goods, as well as his long time associate who enables him to escape prison His lack of personal attachments to other human beings is accompanied by his lack of patriotic attachment In their cold cynicism,

com-“hagel and donner” and “der teyfel,” his habitual curse words that add a Dutch infl ection to his English, signify his status as an outsider in Britain rather than sug-gesting identifi cation with a homeland His Dutch accent is a marker of nationality but not nationalism It remains a superfi cial and even ironic sign that calls attention

to his individualistic nomadic existence

To capture the mutual animosities that divide the characters into two groups, I off er a brief plot summary Th e protagonist is a man named Vanbeest Brown, who is, unbeknownst to himself, the kidnapped (and renamed) son of a Sir Bertram He was kidnapped as a little boy by the villainous Dirk Hattaraick As an adult, Brown per-forms military service in India, where he falls in love with the daughter of his supe-rior, Colonel Guy Mannering When the Mannerings return to Scotland, Brown follows them to make love to the young woman, only to discover that Scotland is his homeland and that he is the long missing heir of the late Sir Bertram As Brown/Bertram uncovers his roots, he is unjustly charged with theft Anxious to establish his innocence, he relies on the help of an aristocrat named Hazelwood, as well as that

of Colonel Mannering Together, Brown/Bertram, Mannering, and Hazelwood confront Hattaraick the smuggler and his accomplice Mr Glossin, a real estate dealer It is not across the lines of new money and old money that these alliances divide Like Hattaraick and Glossin, their enemy Colonel Mannering enjoys wealth derived from money recently amassed in India Th e confl ict between the two camps