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.

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.

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.