Victorian Women’s Travel Writing and the Female-Capitalist Gaze

Victorian Women's Travel Writing and the Female-Capitalist Gaze argues that female travellers both informed and expanded upon Victorian debates surrounding the role of art, and art production, as a nexus of political-economic progress and cultural identity. The book focuses on reading Victorian women's travel narratives as applied political-economic theory. Drawing on histories of women's involvement as organisers, vendors, and shoppers in British bazaars and 'Oriental' department stores, the book examines how female Victorian travellers' use their narratives of shopping and browsing in Eastern markets, museums, and manufactories to grapple with their preconceived notions of the 'Orient', and interrogate the dominant perception that capitalist development was a universal and linear trajectory. This research asserts that Victorian women's travel writing made vital contributions to the development of 'classical' political-economic thought by representing the state of Eastern commerce and craftsmanship through a 'female-capitalist gaze' which performs a comparative evaluation of Western and Eastern trade practices; and also performs a revision of postcolonial literary theory that frames geo-political relationships between Britain, Egypt, Persia, China, and Japan through a historically accurate model of comparative social and political 'progress' that existed simultaneously, but not synonymously, with models based on the 'natural history' of human development. This book is primarily for scholars or postgraduate students of British literature and the histories of art, economics, and empire in the nineteenth century. It would also be of interest for curators and researchers working in the museum and heritage sectors.