.Defoe Mercantilism

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THE NOVEL AND MERCANTILISM: SOME NOTES

it is connected with the change of economy in England in the 1st half ofthe 18th cent.:mercantilism => emergence of a middle class = merchants

the merchants had to know how to read, write, add up numbers;education became important for them

they needed adequate reading-material

book-publishing: has to do with shift of readership

the novel only emerged because of the new readership addressed itselfto the new readers

audience of novels (general):

middle-class women

supposed to educate & entertain they teach moral norms & social habits

according to Henry J ames it acquires: development of character = centralissue

a novel narrates a story a story means that there is a beginning & an end ->usually a forced ending ( all narrative threads are brought to a conclusion: badcharacters are killed, good characters end in wedlock)

Daniel Defoe:Moll Flanders, Robinson Crusoe

Swift: Gullivers Travels

Samuel Richardson:

Pamela (a girl who writes letters she tells about her experiences with hermaster who is after her, she resists because she is moral in the end she isrewarded by getting her master after she has reformed him) was publishedserially in a paper

Clarissa: Richardson chose to wait for reader-responses complicated twists audience liked it a lot

Henry Fielding:

made fun about Richardsons romances = sub-genre of novel, extremeconstruction of the characters they are either good or bad one knows thatright away no extra strings

the novel tries to be accurate in to circumstantial evidence tries to giveaccurate picture of social affairs not a limited set of characters but widerspectrum of life. in that sense the first novelist is: Henry FieldingTom Jones


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FOR A GENERAL DISCUSSION OF DEFOE AND MERCANTILISM SEE:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustan_literature

Gonul BAKAY (Istanbul, Turkey)Moll and Roxana: Defoes Criminals or Female Merchants?

Defoe is among the first novelists to deal with capital as a ruling force in life. Moll and

Roxana can be considered the first female capitalists of fiction. The writer examines the

concept of value; how it can be possessed and exchanged. As David Trotter observes,

the metaphor of circulation, upon which Defoes analysis of wealth was founded,

attributes a greater significance to trade than to manufacture. The people selling, rather

than the people making, are the ones who ensure that wealth is distributed as widely and

efficiently as possible.(Trotter, 3). Both Moll and Roxana have intelligence, youth,

beauty but no capital. Without money they can not enter into circulation unless they

convert their assets of beauty and wit into capital. Both women, because they arewomen, must discipline themselves to circulate body and soul. (Trotter, 42) Theeconomy of trade urged the women to convert their assets into cash. Unless Moll and

Roxana could sell their company, they could not enter into the world of exchange.

Women in the 18th century had few work options. Since in the arrangement of most

marriages portion played an important part, for a woman without financial means going

to service was the only legal way to earn money. For Moll, being a gentle woman has

one meaning; not going into service. Moll has no money and can not enter the

marriage market. Although she loves the elder brother, when he declines to marry her

she is forced to accept the proposal of the younger brother. Moll observes, I began to

see a Danger that I was in which I had not considered before, and that was of beingdropd by both of them, and left alone in the world to shift for myself. (Defoe; Moll

Flanders,51)After the death of her first husband and Moll is left alone by the second,

she marries her third husband which turns out to be her own brother. Incest is defined

by Defoe as a situation which, blocks the exchange of women outside family or clan.

When Moll is no longer young and can not transform her assets into money, she starts to

steal. Soon her criminal identity is well known and when her prison sentence is changed

into transportation she gladly accepts this for colonies allowed one to change the old

identity for the new one of either a servant or a planter. Throughout her life, Moll aimed

to escape from reproduction into production and she was quite successful at that.

Roxana was Defoes most successful business woman. With her views of marriage she

throws light to the marriage concepts of the 18th century from an economic aspect

where women gave all the control of her money and property to her husband.

One cannot help concluding that in the 18th century where- according to Defoesbeliefs-circulation was the most important constituent of trade, the author could not

find it in his heart to morally condemn the criminal actions of his heroines; Moll and

Roxana. On the contrary, he had a secret admiration for them for being in the

circulation and continuing as female merchants despite lacking the most needed

possession in this situation -money.


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Many of the literary critics mentioned above also provide detailed discussions of the so-

called Financial Revolution. Conversely, most economic historians include Defoe in

their discussions; in fact, Coleman and Speck begin their analyses with quotations fromDefoe. Hulme's intriguing discussion of the connotative history of the word "adventure"

links the medieval merchant adventurer to the modern-day adventure capitalist

Boardman, Michael M.Defoe and the Uses of Narrative. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP,

1983.

Chapter 4, "The Captain and Moll," refers to Defoes Captain Singleton andMoll

Flanders

Coleman, . C. The Economy of England: 1450-1750. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Chapter 8, "Trade Transformation, 1650-1750," provides a detailed statistical

analysis of imports and exports to prove that the "considerable English

mercantile advance" of the period was "largely extra-European" and was

"import-led." One problem English mercantilists faced was that the Easternmarkets were more interested in silver than in European manufactures. Points

out that the slave trade was instrumental in England's "catching up" with theSpanish and Dutch in international trade. Asserts that mercantile expansion led

to the improvement of domestic transportation, the growth of the mercantile

marine, a more sophisticated means of conducting financial affairs, the

development of banking and insurance, and a more complex "mechanism of

international payments."

Downie, J. A. "Defoe, Imperialism, and the Travel Books Reconsidered."

Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 66-83.

Rejects the critical consensus that Defoe emphasized travel in his novels toattract readers. Instead, argues that Defoe adapted popular travel literature to

promote economic imperialism: "Robinson Crusoe andCaptain Singleton, as

well asMoll Flanders andColonel Jack, involve imperialistic propaganda to

promote [Defoe's] schemes of trade and colonization." Because of the

"stagnating British economy," Defoe believed that existing colonies had to be

exploited and new settlements had to be founded. For example, the "naked"

savages inRobinson Crusoe andCaptain Singleton represent "potential demand

for English woolen manufacturers." Speculates that afterA New Voyage Roundthe World, "Defoe deserts 'fictional' propaganda almost entirely to concentrate

on the publication of economic propaganda in pamphlets and books."


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Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797.

New York: Methuen, 1986.

Discusses the term "adventurer" in the context of the "pure" adventure story. Points

out that since the twelfth century, "adventurer" has referred to "certain kinds of

investor, originally 'merchant adventurer' . . . more recently 'adventure capitalist,' the

asset stripper who occupies in contemporary populist demonology the place of theearly eighteenth century stock-jobber." Asserts that the "pure" adventure story, which

takes place in an area far removed from Europe, "reached its apogee as the tentaclesof European colonialism were at their greatest reach in the late nineteenth century.

The larger the degree of financial involvement in the non-European world, the more

determinedly non-financial European adventure stories became. . . . There is no such

purity about Robinson Crusoe's 'strange surprizing adventures.'"

Knox-Shaw, Peter. The Explorer in English Fiction. New York: St. Martin's, 1986.

Macey, Samuel L. Money and the Novel: Mercenary Motivation in Defoe and His

Immediate Successors. Victoria, B.C.: Sono Nis Press, 1983.Revises title of Adam Mendilow's Time and the Novel (1952) to argue that the

"monetary motivation of the protagonist gave structure and realism to the eighteenth-

century novel." For example, Defoe's novels "are frequently more realistic in their

monetary motivation than in their temporal structure." Accepts Watt's definition of

realism in the novel and takes the "traditional view that the modern novel begins withDefoe. Senses an ambivalence in Defoe's fiction toward the accumulation of wealth.

Macey, Samuel L. Money and the Novel: Mercenary Motivation in Defoe and His

Immediate Successors. Victoria, B.C.: Sono Nis Press, 1983.

Revises title of Adam Mendilow's Time and the Novel (1952) to argue that the

"monetary motivation of the protagonist gave structure and realism to the eighteenth-century novel." For example, Defoe's novels "are frequently more realistic in their

monetary motivation than in their temporal structure." Accepts Watt's definition ofrealism in the novel and takes the "traditional view that the modern novel begins with

Defoe. Senses an ambivalence in Defoe's fiction toward the accumulation of wealth.

Meir, Thomas Keith. Defoe and the Defense of Commerce. English Literary Studies

Monograph Series, no. 38.Victoria, B.C.: U of Victoria, 1987.

Focuses discussion on Defoe's "major non-fictional economic writings" to show

that "Instead of painstakingly demonstrating that commercial practices foster

rather than inhibit social progress [as defenders of commerce do in the twentieth

century], Defoe was at pains to show that commerce enhanced rather than

destroyed the best features of the older aristocratic order." Provides helpful

definitions of business, industry, commerce, trade, businessman, merchant,

tradesman, and mercantilism. Points out that it is difficult to accurately assessDefoe's economic theories, "for Defoe contradicts, in one or another of the


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pamphlets attributed to him, virtually every economic pronouncement he

makes."

Novak, Maximillian E. Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe. University of

California Publications, English Studies 24, 1962. Reissued. New York; Russell

and Russell, 1976.

Attempts "to provide an exposition and interpretation of Defoe's economic thought and

to explicate the meaning of his fiction in the light of this thought." Argues that

mercantilism "was not merely a theory of trade; it included an entire way of looking at

the world and the people in it." Points out that Defoe was unoriginal and eclectic in his

economic theories: "He was more interested in short-term projects that would better anold and collapsing system than in new ideas that might bring about change."

McKendrick, Brewer & Plumb (eds.) (1982) The Birth of a Consumer Society: thecommercialization of eighteenth-century England

Appleby, J. O. Economic thought and ideology in seventeenth century England

(1978)****

This is the CLASSIC book on the subject

ON THE THEME: GENDER AND MERCANTILISM SEE:

Guest, H. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 (2000) 'Part One:

Learning and Shopping in the Mid-Eighteenth Century'.

Kowaleski-Wallace, E. Consuming subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the

Eighteenth Century (1997)

Kutcha, D. 'The Making of the Self-Made Man: Class, Clothing and EnglishMasculinity, 1688-1832' in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical

Perspective, ed. V. de Grazia & Ellen Furlough (1996).

Klein, L.E. 'Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenth-CenturyEngland' in Textuality and sexuality: reading theories and practices, ed. Judith Still, J.

and M. Worton (1993)

THESE ARE TWO OF THE MOST RECENT BOOKS OF THE SUBJECT

Bellamy, L. Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (1998)

Lynch, D. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture and the Business of

Inner Meaning (1998)


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ON THE QUESTION OF PRIVATE VERSUS PUBLIC (Womens and Mens worlds)

SEE:

Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Trans. 1989)

Chapters I-III, and Chapter IV

Calhoun, C. ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere (1992)

.Defoe Mercantilism

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