Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery

Deirdre Coleman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Sydney.

• 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; 4. 'New Albion': the camp at Port Jackson; 5. Etiquettes of colonisation and dispossession; Epilogue; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

"This important contribution to scholarship on late-18th-century imaginings of colonization is based on a close-reading of a wide variety of contemporary British writings about Botany Bay in New South Wales and Sierra Leone in Africa. Coleman combines British intellectual and political history with literary studies to make a connection between utopian visions of colonization and radical political causes, such as campaigns against slavery, the movement for penal reform, and support for the French Revolution." - Choice