Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery

The loss of Britain’s North American colonies sparked an intense debate about the nature of colonization in the period 1770–1800. Drawing on archival research into colonies in Africa and Australia, including Sierra Leone and Botany Bay, Deirdre Coleman shows how the growing popularity of the anti-slavery movement gave a Utopian cast to the debate about colonization. This Utopianism can be seen most clearly in Romantic attempts to found an empire without slaves, a new world which would also encompass revolutionary sexual, racial, and labour arrangements. From Henry Smeathman and John Clarkson in Sierra Leone to Arthur Phillip and William Dawes in Botany Bay, Coleman analyzes the impact of the discourses and ideals underlying Romantic colonization. She argues that these paved the way for racial strife in West Africa and the eventual dispossession of Australia’s native people.

• Coleman examines the impact of the anti-slavery movement on British Romanticism • Based on extensive archival research on texts on race and slavery published in the eighteenth century • Examines the origins of globalisation in the eighteenth century

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: the Cowpastures; 1. Henry Smeathman, imperial flycatcher and aeronaut; 2. The ‘microscope of enthusiasm’: Swedenborgian ideas about Africa; 3. Rallying under the flag of Empire: the Nova Scotians in Sierra Leone; Landing place; 4. ‘New Albion’: the camp at Port Jackson; 5. Etiquettes of colonization and dispossession; Epilogue; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

\'Romantic Colonization \'redefines the romantic by making romantic sensibility central to colonialism\'.\' Studies in English Literature

\'Coleman offers a set of fascinating and, in places, inspiring, episodes in the history of the West African colony of Sierra Leone … Coleman\'s study happily reopens for romanticists the issue of utopianism and politics … an excellent book.\' Anne Janowitz, author of Slavery and Abolition

\'Coleman\'s achievement is twofold. First, she provides intelligent readings of texts often neglected by other scholars that deal with romantic ideas about colonization. Second, she shows there was a ferment of ideas concerning the nature of slavery, coercion, penal servitude and freedom in the late-eighteenth-century British Empire and many ideas for new experiments in the construction of imperial identities. Literary historians will gain much from the dissection of the texts and their contextualization in this study. Historians of slavery, anti-slavery and colonial settler societies will also learn much from the book.\' Ethnic and Racial Studies