ABSTRACT
Michèle Barrett has unearthed significant archival material preserved at the Leonard Woolf archives, which has revealed Virginia Woolf's extraordinary contribution to her husband's book, Empire and Commerce in Africa. In The Voyage Out, Woolf provides vital links with New World historiography, its discovery, exploration, and conquest, having as its main satirical target Western notions of 'progress', European racial superiority, and the economic exploitation of the New World's natural resources and their local inhabitants. Dominic Davies points out that the anti-imperialist tradition of thought developed by Leonard Woolf, Hobson, and Lenin precisely interrogated 'the interrelation between capitalism and imperialism as two separate, but mutually sustaining, modes of exploitative practice'. In the context of Argentina's spectacular agro-export 'boom', Rachel Vinrace's pointed exclamation 'poor little goats' acquires an even more sinister political-economic signification. Woolf strategically uses this unscrupulous English pair as embodiment of a deeply corrupt and unregulated system that shamelessly exploits the local indigenous communities, especially the labour produced by its women.
