LOUDON, Margracia.

£850 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Philanthropic Economy; First edition, the most important economic work of "perhaps the most influential female contributor to the intellectual debate on the repeal of the Corn Laws", unopened in its original state."In the 1830s a middle-class Irish woman, based in the developing spa town of Leamington in Warwickshire took the literary and political world by storm... Her Philanthropic Economy, which was published in 1835, was an innovative attempt to redefine the very nature of government activity and to recast the bases of political economy. The work was widely reviewed and published in several editions before the Anti-Corn Law League chose a section to be distributed to all electors in the 1840s (around nine million copies). Yet her publications and even her name - Margracia Loudon - are largely unknown today. An evaluation of her political life and work demonstrate not only the richness and diversity of the political words of middle-class women in the nineteenth century but also the challenges posed in recapturing these" (Richardson, p. 5).Though it was the sections on the Corn Laws that brought fame and notoriety, the work more broadly is a well-developed system of political economy, extending into the areas of wealth creation, taxation policy, currency reform, and the ballot. Labour is seen as the source of a nation's wealth - quoting from Adam Smith - and an economy geared towards landowners is not just morally wrong but economically nonsensical. Her proposals include re

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