Abstract
For Daniel Defoe, at least as he wrote under the guise of Mr. Review, man was made not only to trade, but also to trade freely. Bemoaning the fact that a pursuit that tended towards the prosperity and health of the world was accounted dishonourable, and foreshadowing the logic articulated by those nineteenth-century proponents of free trade who followed Smith and Ricardo, the essay “Mr. Review Plumps for Free Trade” found Defoe wondering at the gentry who “pretend to despise families raised by trade.” Such a disingenuous reaction, Defoe intimated, was born of parochial prejudice. In contrast to this peculiar narrow-mindedness was positioned the “true-bred merchant.” A “universal scholar,” the merchant is positioned outside the debilitating contingencies of culture and history:
He understands languages without books, geography without maps; his journals and trading voyages delineate the world; his foreign exchanges, protests, and procurations speak all tongues. He sits in his counting house and converses with all nations, and keeps up the most exquisite and extensive part of human society in a universal correspondence.1
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Notes
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© 2009 Paul Young
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Young, P. (2009). Geography Made Easy. In: Globalization and the Great Exhibition. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594319_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594319_3
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