Epistolary and historical writings

Abstract

This chapter examines Wollstonecraft’s epistolary and historical works from the mid 1790s focusing on the analysis of commercial civilization contained therein. Although Wollstonecraft in these works sympathized with the republican argument that commerce debases character, corrupts virtue, and fosters relations of dependence, her attitude towards commercial society was not straightforwardly adversarial. Particularly in her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution Wollstonecraft moved beyond moralistic broadsides against commerce to account for its role in advancing civilization and undermining prejudice. And while she expressed doubts about the compatibility of commerce with republican freedom, she ultimately concluded that a well-regulated commerce was a necessary check on the provincialism and narrow-mindedness that would otherwise prevail in a predominantly agricultural economy. Even Wollstonecraft’s virulent attacks on commerce in her Letters from a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark were directed primarily at the perverse forms of speculative trade that thrived during the revolutionary wars of the 1790s rather than at commerce per se.