From revolutionary Paris to Nootka Sound to Saint-Domingue: The international politics and prejudice behind Wollstonecraft’s theory of the rights of humanity, 1789–91

Abstract

Against the background of the international political crises generated by the early phase of the French Revolution at Nootka Sound in 1790 and in Saint-Domingue in 1791, Mary Wollstonecraft developed a capacious political theory of the “rights of humanity.” She pushed beyond narrow post-revolutionary European constructions of “the rights of man” which ignored or excluded “the poor,” “Indians,” “African slaves,” and “women.” While closely following the international politics of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft developed the core arguments of A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Her key philosophical innovation was to publicly universalize the conceptual scope of rights, such that rights were no longer—implicitly or explicitly—solely the legal entitlement of propertied white European men, but rather the moral and political entitlement of the whole of humanity across nations. Yet she rhetorically contradicted and philosophically limited the cross-cultural universalism of her theory of equal rights by punctuating her arguments with Western Protestant and Orientalist stereotypes of Eastern despotism. Consequently, international politics and international prejudice shaped Wollstonecraft’s theory of equal rights and her application of it to peoples and cultures beyond those of Western Protestant Europe.