Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery

Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery. By Deirdre Coleman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xv, 273; 14 illustrations. $75.00 cloth. The fantasy of the colony as a Utopian new world capable of remaking its inhabitants was a common phenomenon in the romantic age from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. In Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery, Deirdre Coleman shows brilliantly not only how widespread the phenomenon was but also how diverse its manifestations were. The idea of the moral colony had deep roots in late eighteenth-century British culture, and interacted in important ways with the abolitionist movement, Coleman argues. The title Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery is a little misleading. This book focuses more on romantic colonization than it does on its relationship to the British abolitionist movement- perhaps not surprisingly, given its timeframe of 1770 to 1800. The book comprises a series of discrete studies. Romantic Colonization opens and closes with discussions of the foundation of New South Wales, including what Coleman tellingly terms the "etiquettes of colonization and dispossession." A second section examines Henry Smeathman, an entomologist in West Africa who saw the termite colonies he explored as models for imperial greatness. An abolitionist colonial projector, Smeathman argued for a West African colony settled by freed slaves and founded on "rational commerce" that would act as a beacon to Africa (despite Smeathman's own earlier moment of apostasy as he temporarily lapsed into support for slavery, perhaps bolstered by his polygamous marriages into African slaving families). A fascinating subsequent chapter looks at Swedenborgian ideas about Africa as a lost paradise, tellingly followed by an examination of the early years of the evangelical colony of Sierra Leone and the troubled relationships between colonial masters and their recalcitrant black loyalist subjects. Here, as elsewhere, the juxtaposition of plans that were never put into effect with those that were compels us to take more seriously the ideas behind the unrealized projects, and also highlights the profoundly unrealistic elements in the plans that did lead to real colonies. In this light, the flaws in romantic views of both Sierra Leone and New South Wales are glaringly apparent; the price of miscalculation was paid by black settlers and, most brutally, by indigenous Australians. Although there is much more to the book than an examination of romanticism and anti-slavery, this is not to say that the work does not shed light on abolitionism. Romantic Colonization points to the blurred lines between free and unfree labor, even in the colonial imagination. Debates over labor and the quest for alternatives to slavery are a leitmotif of the book. …