Slavery, Empire, Race

Abstract

In Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery, Deirdre Coleman points out that “by 1820 Britain ruled 200 million people, over a quarter of the world’s population,” and that it was difficult to find anyone not involved in some way or another with the “imperial system” (2005: 237). As with people, so with literary texts: it is correspondingly difficult to find novels or extended poems written between 1750 and 1850 that make no reference, however fleeting, to Britain’s burgeoning empire, be it in the Americas, Asia or the Pacific. By the start of the eighteenth century, the trickle of literature concerned with empire had become a flood, and by the end of the eighteenth century the flood had become a deluge. Non-fictional texts poured forth from the press and included voyage narratives, autobiographies, histories, natural histories, geographies and ingenious schemes to enrich the nation. These, in turn, inspired novels, poems and plays about colonies, hoped-for colonies, colonists and the colonized. Together, fiction and non-fiction lauded the benefits to both Britons and native peoples of rational government based on sound commercial principles. Just as often, however, they lamented the depredations that colonization made on the colonized and, in a related set of rhetorical manoeuvres, they increasingly questioned slavery and the slave trade.