Slavery as depicted in literature and culture is examined in this wide-ranging collection. On 25 March 1807, the bill for the abolition of the Slave Trade within the British colonies was passed by an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, becoming law from 1 May. This new collection of essays marks this crucialbut conflicted historical moment and its troublesome legacies. They discuss the literary and cultural manifestations of slavery, abolition and emancipation from the eighteenth century to the present day, addressing such subjects and issues as: the relationship between Christian and Islamic forms of slavery and the polemical and scholarly debates these have occasioned; the visual representations of the moment of emancipation; the representation of slave rebellion; discourses of race and slavery; memory and slavery; and captivity and slavery. Among the writers and thinkers discussed are: Frantz Fanon, William Earle Jr, Olaudah Equiano, Charlotte Smith, Caryl Phillips, Bryan Edwards,Elizabeth Marsh, as well as a wide range of other thinkers, writers and artists. The volume also contains the hitherto unpublished text of an essay by the naturalist Henry Smeathman, Oeconomy of the Slave Ship. Contributors: GEORGE BOULUKOS, DEIRDRE COLEMAN, MARAROULA JOANNOU, GERALD MACLEAN, FELICITY NUSSBAUM, DIANA PATON, SARA SALIH, LINCOLN SHLENSKY, MARCUS WOOD

Assembles a range of women's letters from the former British Empire. These letters 'written home' are not only historical sources; they are also representations of the state of the Empire in far-off lands sent home to Britain and, occasionally, other centres established as 'home'.

Assembles a range of women's letters from the former British Empire. These letters 'written home' are not only historical sources; they are also representations of the state of the Empire in far-off lands sent home to Britain and, occasionally, other centres established as 'home'.

Assembles a range of women's letters from the former British Empire. These letters 'written home' are not only historical sources; they are also representations of the state of the Empire in far-off lands sent home to Britain and, occasionally, other centres established as 'home'.

Assembles a range of women's letters from the former British Empire. These letters 'written home' are not only historical sources; they are also representations of the state of the Empire in far-off lands sent home to Britain and, occasionally, other centres established as 'home'.

Assembles a range of women's letters from the former British Empire. These letters 'written home' are not only historical sources; they are also representations of the state of the Empire in far-off lands sent home to Britain and, occasionally, other centres established as 'home'.

Assembles a range of women's letters from the former British Empire. These letters 'written home' are not only historical sources; they are also representations of the state of the Empire in far-off lands sent home to Britain and, occasionally, other centres established as 'home'.

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 analyses 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.

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 analyses 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.

In 1771 Joseph Banks and other wealthy collectors sent a talented, self-taught naturalist to Sierra Leone to collect all things rare and curious, from moths to monkeys. Henry Smeathman's expedition to the West African coast, which coincided with a steep rise in British slave trading in this area, lasted four years during which time he built a house on the Banana Islands, married into the coast's ruling dynasties, and managed to negotiate the tricky life of a 'stranger' bound to his landlord and local customs. In this book, which draws on a rich and little-known archive of journals and letters, Coleman retraces Smeathman's life as he shuttled between his home on the Bananas and two key Liverpool trading forts-Bunce Island and the Isles de Los. In the logistical challenges of tropical collecting and the dispatch of specimens across the middle passage we see the close connection between science and slavery. We also see the hardening of Smeathman's attitude towards the slaves, a change of sentiment which was later reversed by four years in the West Indies. The book concludes with the 'Flycatcher' back in London - a celebrated termite specialist, eager to return to West Africa to establish a free, antislavery settlement.

This fully-annotated edition of Anna Maria Falconbridge's Two Voyages to Sierra Leone (1794) and Mary Ann Parker's A Voyage Round the World (1795) brings together the first published accounts by women of these new sites of British colonization. Laying the texts alongside one another brings into conjunction Britain's concurrent, late-18th-century systems of transportation and resettlement, convictism and slavery.