In Mary Wollstonecraft's final work, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798), the eponymous heroine wonders ‘if women have a country’. Her argument foreshadows that of Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas (1938): ‘“For,” the outsider will say, “in fact, as a woman, I have no country”’. In the 1790s, Maria's husband can abuse her, imprison her, separate her from her child and spend her inheritance – yet she has no right to divorce or prosecute him. Almost 150 years later, Woolf reflects on the gender inequality still enshrined in British law and custom. For both writers, this disenfranchisement exempts women from ‘unreal loyalties’ to their nations. With no stake in international rivalries, women are free to embrace a broader love of humankind. ‘As a woman’, Woolf writes, ‘I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world’. This book contends that Wollstonecraft took just such a global perspective. Not only was she driven to reject national allegiances, her oeuvre was shaped by the European exchange of enlightened ideas and her experiences of travel and expatriation in Revolutionary France. To this transnational perspective, she brought an overarching belief in the commonalities of human experience and a growing appreciation of cultural diversity. In short, Wollstonecraft was a cosmopolitan.

The term ‘cosmopolitan’ is loose and contested, invoked to support a range of philosophical positions and competing political agendas. It is clear, however, that ‘cosmopolitanism’ suggests, not simply globetrotting, but a deliberate attempt to expand one's imagined community beyond the nation. In the last two decades, literary critics and historians of the long eighteenth century have challenged the constraints of national literatures, drawing attention to the pivotal role of translation and pan-European exchanges in the growth and development of literary systems and genres. Recent scholarship has also illuminated vital networks of transnational exchange and influence between women writers in the period, patterns of literary and cultural transfer that Wollstonecraft's works undoubtedly exemplify. As Galin Tihanov points out, however, ‘transnationalism’ is ‘a value-free descriptive framework’, a catch-all term to describe phenomena that transcend national borders. Cosmopolitanism, by contrast, has an ethical dimension. As well as recognising human interdependence across the boundaries of race, nation and culture, almost all cosmopolitan thought ‘maintains that there are moral obligations owed to all human beings based solely on our humanity alone’.