The increasingly global dimension of capitalism in the Victorian age had a significant impact on perceptions about the nature of English sovereignty. To accommodate these changes, Lauren M. E. Goodlad has argued, English liberals created ‘a nationalist discourse on the global that professed to explain Britain's place in the world and in history’ (Goodlad 2009: 439–40). Victorian literature contributed to the creation of this ‘foreign policy’. Developing in response to imperial encounters, Victorian realism can be considered as a geopolitical aesthetic, ‘the expression of “an unconscious collective effort” to “figure out” the “landscapes and forces” embedded in global processes that are at once lived and beyond conscious experience’ (Goodlad 2010b: 406; Jameson 1992: 3; Stewart 2000). Authorising two interlocking conceptions of sovereignty on the basis of two different ideas of value, Trollope's works from the 1850s and 1860s are a case in point.

As a first part of his geopolitical aesthetic, Trollope depicts English sovereignty ‘as the product of an organic national history’ (Goodlad 2009: 443). His novels set in Barsetshire present ‘in-depth portraits of England's provincial interior’, thus exerting a ‘centripetal force against [global] dispersion’ (Goodlad 2009: 441). The Barsetshire novels accomplish this task by imagining value in symbolic terms. The value of the cathedral spire in Barchester Towers or the gates to the Gresham estate in Doctor Thorne is symbolic rather than material and resides in their history. The second part of Trollope's geopolitical aesthetic authorises English sovereignty on the basis of the individual's capacity to produce economic value, thus providing an ‘ideological justification for the settlement of land outside English borders’ (Goodlad 2009: 441). Trollope articulates this foreign policy in his travel writings, which paradoxically intertwine the logic of cosmopolitan commerce with racial prejudice. Trollope presents himself as a ‘self-styled teller of hard truths’ (Buzard 2010: 176): if the English did a better job at producing economic value than the colonial races, then there was nothing left for the latter but to disappear. Of ‘the Australian black man’, for instance, ‘we may certainly say that he has to go’ (Trollope 2002: 1.76). In his account of his journey to Iceland, Trollope uses the same argument for the inhabitants of St Kilda: ‘Who shall say that these people ought to be deported from their homes and placed recklessly upon some point of the mainland?’ (1878: 11).