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.
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Works cited
Basker, James, ed. (2002) Amazing Grace: an Anthology of Poems About Slavery, 1660–1810 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).
Carey, Brycchan (2005) British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Carretta, Vincent (2005) Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press).
Clarkson, Thomas (1786) An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African, translated from a Latin Dissertation, which was Honoured with the First Prize, in the University of Cambridge, for the Year 1785, with Additions (London: J. Phillips). Accessed from: http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1070.
Coleman, Deirdre (2005) Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1971) “Lecture on the Slave Trade,” in Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. L. Patton and P. Mann (Princeton: Routledge and Princeton University Press): 235–51.
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Further reading
Carey, Brycchan, ed. “Slavery Poems”, http://www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/poetry.htm.
Carretta, Vincent, ed. (1996) Unchained Voices: an Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky).
“Documenting the American South,” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, http://docsouth.unc.edu/.Slave Narratives online.
Engerman, Stanley, Seymour Drescher and Robert Paquette, eds. (2001) Slavery: a Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Gregg, Stephen, ed. (2005) Empire and Identity: an Eighteenth-Century Sourcebook (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Kitson, Peter, Debbie Lee, et al., eds. (1999) Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, 8 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus). This text provides facsimiles of many primary sources.
Morgan, Kenneth, et al., eds. (2003) The British Transatlantic Slave Trade, 4 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto).
Richardson, Alan, ed. “Editing Anti-Slavery Poems Project,” http://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/asp.html.
Williamson, Karina, ed. (2008) Contrary Voices: Representations of West Indian Slavery, 1657–1834 (Kingston, JA: University of West Indies Press).
Wood, Marcus, ed. (2003) The Poetry of Slavery: an Anglo-American Anthology 1764–1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
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© 2010 Brycchan Carey
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Carey, B. (2010). Slavery, Empire, Race. In: Higgins, D., Ruston, S. (eds) Teaching Romanticism. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230276482_7
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