Book contents
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Political Economy and Commercial Society in the 1790s
- Chapter 2 The Engagement with Burke
- Chapter 3 Property, Passions, and Manners
- Chapter 4 Political Economy in Revolution
- Chapter 5 Property in Political Economy
- Chapter 6 Credit and Credulity
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Chapter 4 - Political Economy in Revolution
France, Free Commerce, and Wollstonecraft’s History of the French Revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 February 2024
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Political Economy and Commercial Society in the 1790s
- Chapter 2 The Engagement with Burke
- Chapter 3 Property, Passions, and Manners
- Chapter 4 Political Economy in Revolution
- Chapter 5 Property in Political Economy
- Chapter 6 Credit and Credulity
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Romanticism
Summary
This chapter addresses Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), the work in which she engages most explicitly with contemporary political economic thought. Noting that she gives particular prominence to the liberation of the grain trade in the early years of the Revolution, it explores how Wollstonecraft uses the issue to yoke commercial with political forms of liberty. The free circulation of grain was a totemic issue in Adam Smith’s new political economy of ‘natural liberty’, but it also pitted the market against traditional notions of ‘moral economy’. The chapter also explores Wollstonecraft’s links with Girondin politicians, including Jacques Pierre Brissot, and theirs with the Shelburne circle of the 1780s, and discusses the involvement of Americans Joel Barlow and Gilbert Imlay in provisioning the French Republic in the mid-1790s: activity which informed the hostility to commerce of Wollstonecraft’s later works.
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- Mary Wollstonecraft and Political EconomyThe Feminist Critique of Commercial Modernity, pp. 112 - 146Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024