The Failure of Trade's Empire in The History of Emily Montague

The contingencies of applying free trade imperialism to an impoverished Canada in the 1760s force the characters in Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague to abandon the sentimental colonial project, retreating to England to establish their domestic Utopia. Other critics have read Emily Montague's relation to the colonial project as ambiguous; I agree but relate these ambiguities not to the novel's gender or colonial practices, but to its economic ideology of global laissez-faire capitalism. Brooke's novel tries to narrate a plot of infinite wealth accumulation, but Canada's particular political and economic problems will not abide. The novel ends up laying bare the contradictions at the heart of this emerging liberal economic theory.