Ayșe Çelikkol. Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 189+x pp. ISBN 978-0-19-976900-1. US$74.00/£45.00

The book’s economic argument is fairly straightforward—again, providing a series of oppositions ready-made for allegory. Nineteenth-century Britain saw a transition from protectionism to free trade, bolstered by arguments for protectionist measures such as the Corn Laws, on the one side, and calls for the repeal of such prohibitions on the other. Both protectionists and free-traders exploited the apparent tensions between capitalism and the nation-state: the way in which, for instance, the movement of capital threatens to annihilate those spatial boundaries on which nationalism depends, even as the boundaries of the nation-state play a key role in shaping the movement of money and commodities. Though free trade’s opponents sought to arouse anxieties about the potential weakening of Britain’s economic and political control, Çelikkol argues that the development of global capitalism and the strengthening of the nation-state went hand in hand. Çelikkol reads this political and economic contest as a series of variations on the opposition between circulation and enclosure, aligned respectively with romance and realism. Situating her argument in relation to work on economics, romance, subjectivity, and the novel by Lauren Goodlad, Ian Duncan, and Amanda Anderson, she develops her contention that romance is the genre of free trade. Citing the tendency to see romance as a “marvelous alternative to the sordid reality of modern capitalism,” she argues instead that capitalism functions as an opportunity for the deployment of romantic narratives and characters, with romance providing “a means of representing and evaluating free trade paradigms such as endless circulation, unrestricted competition, and the dissolution of centralized power” (115-6). Indeed, reading economic policy into and out of novelistic character (and secondarily plot) is one of the book’s chief strategies and defining pleasures. At issue in a character’s status as anchored or “disanchored” (8), attached or unattached to a particular nation and its ideals, is the economically-inflected significance of character itself, with the well-rounded characters of bourgeois realism opposed to the more “flat” characters of romance. The “freedom” of free trade issues in a kind of lawlessness—that of the smuggler and the pirate, for instance, who figure here as detached and deracinated identities—with the sea functioning as a kind of romantic nowhere-space undermining the supposedly irrefutable necessity of national boundaries. As the argument demonstrates, these categories are not static, and a flatly-represented “romantic” (31) smuggler may in some cases attain the interiority of the full-fledged realist subject, advancing the free-trade argument via the integration of romance and realism. Çelikkol’s allegorical vision is immediately apparent in the early chapter on Scott, in which smugglers are said to constitute a “flesh-and-blood corollary to the invisible hand,” reifying “the abstract laws that [Adam] Smith claimed to reveal” (14). Smugglers in Guy Mannering (1815), like the “meandering merchants” (43) of Marryat’s fiction, are associated with wandering and the dreamlike elements of romance. Commodities and characters circulate freely, these texts demonstrate, in opposition to nationalism’s and realism’s insistence on orderliness and fixed boundaries. Çelikkol’s chapter on the figure of the promiscuous merchant in Victorian melodramas ties free trade to representations of transgressive sexuality as well as to deviant narrative, aligning it with the kind of “waverings and variations” that, according to D.A. Miller, require narrative correction (99). Such “flirtatio[us]” (99) narrative runs the risk, she points out, of rendering seductive the freedom and lawlessness it had meant to oppose. Later chapters on Harriet Martineau and Charlotte Brontë extend the argument about transgression and boundary-crossing to issues of gender, sexuality, and marriage, arguing, for instance, that Martineau’s “Dawn Island” (1845) uses fertility as a metaphor for commercial circulation, bringing capitalism and nature together in a pre-modern romantic alignment. Here …