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COPYRIGHT 2006 Boston University
Deirdre Coleman. Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi+273. $85.00.
Deirdre Coleman's Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery is an archivally grounded and critically perceptive investigation of some of the most significant relationships during the last decades of the eighteenth century between the creation of the British Empire and the rise of the movement to abolish the slave trade. Coleman's "principal subject ... is visionary writing about new settlements, with colonization understood as a leap of the imagination as well as a leap in geographical space and time." She argues convincingly that the resettlement of Britain's black poor from London and Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, as well as the transportation of British convicts to the penal colony of Botany Bay (Port Jackson) in New Holland (Australia) demonstrate the validity of "Michel Foucault's identification of the colony as a 'heterotopia of compensation,'" whose role is to create "'another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled'" (2). Motivating late-eighteenth-century desires for such worlds elsewhere, especially for abolitionists, she further argues, following David Brion Davis, was less "about humanitarianism than about devising new forms of labour exploitation" (28).
As Coleman notes, the African and Australian colonies were direct results of Britain's defeat in the American Revolution. The loss of a substantial part of Britain's first empire left the country...
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