Colonial Lives Across the British Empire

David Lambert is Lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (2005). Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex. His previous books include South Africa Past, Present and Future (2000) and Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (2001).

• Introduction: Imperial spaces, imperial subjects David Lambert and Alan Lester; 1. Gregor MacGregor: clansman, conquistador and colonizer on the fringes of the British Empire Matthew Brown; 2. A blister on the imperial Antipodes: Lancelot Edward Threlkeld in Polynesia and Australia Anna Johnston; 3. Missionary politics and the captive audience: William Shrewsbury in the Caribbean and the Cape Colony Alan Lester and David Lambert; 4. Richard Bourke: Irish liberalism tempered by empire Zoë Laidlaw; 5. George Grey in Ireland: narrative and network Leigh Dale; 6. 'Wonderful adventures of Mrs. Seacole in many lands' (1857): colonial identity and the geographical imagination Anita Rupprecht; 7. Inter-colonial migration and the refashioning of indentured labour: Arthur Gordon in Trinidad, Mauritius and Fiji Laurence Brown; 8. Sir John Pope Hennessy and colonial government: humanitarianism and the translation of slavery in the imperial network Philip Howell and David Lambert; 9. Sunshine and sorrows: Canada, Ireland and Lady Aberdeen Val McLeish; 10. Mary Curzon: 'American Queen of India' Nicola J. Thomas; 11. Making Scotland in South Africa: Charles Murray, the Transvaal's Aberdeenshire poet Jonathan Hyslop; Epilogue: Imperial careering at home: Harriet Martineau on empire Catherine Hall; Bibliography.

Review of the hardback: '[Colonial Lives] brings together recent work on biography and subjectivity on the one hand and the literature on space and place that has done much to shape contemporary apprehensions of empire, and it does so with fresh insight and a lot of intellectual energy as well.' Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History