Victorian Women’s Travel Writing and the Female-Capitalist Gaze: Narrating Commerce, Craftsmanship, and Nationhood in the Middle East and Asia

Victorian Women’s Travel Writing and the Female-Capitalist Gaze argues that female travellers both informed and expanded upon Victorian debates surrounding the role of art, and art production, as a nexus of political-economic progress and cultural identity. The book focuses on reading Victorian women’s travel narratives as applied political-economic theory. Drawing on histories of women’s involvement as organisers, vendors, and shoppers in British bazaars and ’Oriental’ department stores, the book examines how female Victorian travellers’ use their narratives of shopping and browsing in Eastern markets, museums, and manufactories to grapple with their preconceived notions of the ’Orient’, and interrogate the dominant perception that capitalist development was a universal and linear trajectory. Fundamentally, the book demonstrates that Victorian women travellers made vital contributions to the development of ’classical’ political-economic thought by performing comparative evaluations of Western and Eastern commerce, craftsmanship, and nationhood framed through a ’female-capitalist gaze’. This book also offers a revisionary approach to postcolonial literary theory that frames geo-political relationships between Britain, Egypt, Persia, China, and Japan through a historically accurate model of comparative social and political ’progress’ that existed simultaneously, but not synonymously, with models based on the ’natural history’ of human development. This book is primarily for scholars or postgraduate students of British literature and the histories of art, economics, and empire in the nineteenth century. It would also be of interest for curators and researchers working in the museum and heritage sectors.

Margaret Gray is an early-career researcher based in Oxford, UK. She earned her PhD in English Literature at Newcastle University in 2024; her body of work focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to Victorian literature and aesthetic culture. She has published articles on Victorian women travellers as collectors of Japanese art and Buddhist approaches to Victorian aesthetics. In addition to academic teaching and research, she has worked as an archivist, curatorial assistant, and writer for UK institutions including Newcastle University, the Bodleian Library (Oxford), and UNESCO Blue Shield.