Drawing on works by Walter Scott, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, and others, Romances of Free Trade offers a new account of the cultural work of romance in nineteenth-century Britain, arguing that novelists and playwrights employed the genre to represent a radically new historical formation: the emergence of the global free-market economy.
Introduction: narrating global capitalism in the romance mode -- Walter Scott's disloyal smugglers -- Meandering merchants and narrators in Captain Marryat's nautical fiction -- Harriet Martineau on the fertility of exchange -- Promiscuity, commerce, and closure in early Victorian drama -- Mutuality, marriage, and Charlotte Brontë's free traders -- The compression of space in Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit -- Epilogue: cycles of capitalist expansion.