Introduction

This introduction provides an overview of the critical and historical contexts that inform my argument for reading Victorian women’s travel writing as living illustrations of political economy explored through a unique ‘female-capitalist gaze’. I start by examining the changing attitudes within scholarship on women’s travel writing over the last 30 years amidst growing historical evidence that Victorian women’s voices were not as marginalised as previously assumed; this necessarily problematises the postcolonial and postcolonial-feminist frameworks that continue to dominate travel criticism and related fields. The second section will introduce a brief history of political economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and establish the historical and theoretical basis for reading Victorian women’s travel writing as political-economic texts. I will also outline the importance of art and art production in the work of prominent capitalist and proto-socialist theorists Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Malthus, J.S. Mill, John Ruskin, and William Morris (who will be referred to throughout the book), and demonstrate the interconnected roots of capitalism, ethnography, and sociology that inform the ‘female-capitalist gaze.’