This volume explores the complex relationships between early Nineteenth-Century representations of emigration, colonization and settlement, and the social, economic and cultural conditions within which they were produced. It stresses the role of writers, illustrators and artists in 'making' colonial/settler landscapes within the metropolitan imaginary, paying particularly close attention to the complex interdependencies between metropolis and colony, which have too often been reduced to simplistic binaries of centre and periphery, metropolitan core and colonial outpost. Focusing on material dealing with Canada, the Cape, Australia and New Zealand, its interdisciplinarity and global reach consequently adds considerably to the field of colonial studies.

The Routledge History of Western Empires is an all new volume focusing on the history of Western Empires in a comparative and thematic perspective. Comprising of thirty-three original chapters arranged in eight thematic sections, the book explores European overseas expansion from the Age of Discovery to the Age of Decolonisation. Studies by both well-known historians and new scholars offer fresh, accessible perspectives on a multitude of themes ranging from colonialism in the Arctic to the scramble for the coral sea, from attitudes to the environment in the East Indies to plans for colonial settlement in Australasia. Chapters examine colonial attitudes towards poisonous animals and the history of colonial medicine, evangelisaton in Africa and Oceania, colonial recreation in the tropics and the tragedy of the slave trade. The Routledge History of Western Empires ranges over five centuries and crosses continents and oceans highlighting transnational and cross-cultural links in the imperial world and underscoring connections between colonial history and world history. Through lively and engaging case studies, contributors not only weigh in on historiographical debates on themes such as human rights, religion and empire, and the ‘taproots’ of imperialism, but also illustrate the various approaches to the writing of colonial history. A vital contribution to the field.

British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832-1877 examines the literature of Victorian settler emigration in America, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, arguing that popular Victorian periodicals played a key and overlooked role in imagining and moderating this dramatic historical experience.

Building on the growing critical engagement with globalization in literary studies, this book confronts the paradox that at a time when transnational human movement occurred globally on an unprecedented scale, British fiction appeared to turn inward to tell stories of local places that valorized stability and rootedness. In contrast, this book reveals how literary works, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the advent of the New Imperialism, were active components of a culture of colonization and emigration. Fictional texts, as print commodities, were enmeshed in technologies of transport and communication, and innovations in literary form were spurred by the conditions and consequences of human movement.

A wide-ranging new survey of the role of the sea in Britain's global presence in the 19th century. Mostly at peace, but sometimes at war, Britain grew as a maritime empire in the Victorian era. This collection looks at British sea-power as a strategic, moral and cultural force.

During the tumultuous closing decades of the nineteenth century, as the prospect of democracy loomed and as intensified global economic and strategic competition reshaped the political imagination, British thinkers grappled with the question of how best to organize the empire. Many found an answer to the anxieties of the age in the idea of Greater Britain, a union of the United Kingdom and its settler colonies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and southern Africa. In The Idea of Greater Britain, Duncan Bell analyzes this fertile yet neglected debate, examining how a wide range of thinkers conceived of this vast "Anglo-Saxon" political community. Their proposals ranged from the fantastically ambitious--creating a globe-spanning nation-state--to the practical and mundane--reinforcing existing ties between the colonies and Britain. But all of these ideas were motivated by the disquiet generated by democracy, by challenges to British global supremacy, and by new possibilities for global cooperation and communication that anticipated today's globalization debates. Exploring attitudes toward the state, race, space, nationality, and empire, as well as highlighting the vital theoretical functions played by visions of Greece, Rome, and the United States, Bell illuminates important aspects of late-Victorian political thought and intellectual life.

Imperial Boredom offers a radical reconsideration of the British Empire during its heyday in the nineteenth century. Challenging the long-established view that the empire was about adventure and excitement, with heroic men and intrepid women eagerly spreading commerce and civilization around the globe, this thoroughly researched, engagingly written, and lavishly illustrated account suggests instead that boredom was central to the experience of empire. Combining individual stories of pain and perseverance with broader analysis, Professor Auerbach considers what it was actually like to sail to Australia, to serve as a soldier in South Africa, or to accompany a colonial official to the hill stations of India. He reveals that for numerous men and women, from explorers to governors, tourists to settlers, the Victorian Empire was dull and disappointing. Drawing on diaries, letters, memoirs, and travelogues, Imperial Boredom demonstrates that all across the empire, men and women found the landscapes monotonous, the physical and psychological distance from home debilitating, the routines of everyday life wearisome, and their work tedious and unfulfilling. The empire s early years may have been about wonder and marvel, but the Victorian Empire was a far less exciting project. Many books about the British Empire focus on what happened; this book concentrates on how people felt.

This book compares the nineteenth-century settler literatures of Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United States in order to examine how they enable readers to manage guilt accompanying European settlement. Reading canonical texts such as Last of the Mohicans and Backwoods of Canada against underanalyzed texts such as Adventures in Canada and George Linton or the First Years of a British Colony, it demonstrates how tropes like the settler hero and his indigenous servant, the animal hunt, the indigenous attack, and the lost child cross national boundaries. Settlers similarly responded to the stressors of taking another’s land through the stories they told about themselves, which functioned to defend against uncomfortable feelings of guilt and ambivalence by creating new versions of reality. This book traces parallels in 20th and 21st century texts to ultimately argue that contemporary settlers continue to fight similar psychological and cultural battles since settlement is never complete.

In 1830, with France's colonial empire in ruins, Charles X ordered his army to invade Ottoman Algiers. Victory did not salvage his regime from revolution, but it began the French conquest of Algeria, which was continued and consolidated by the succeeding July Monarchy. In By Sword and Plow, Jennifer E. Sessions explains why France chose first to conquer Algeria and then to transform it into its only large-scale settler colony. Deftly reconstructing the political culture of mid-nineteenth-century France, she also sheds light on policies whose long-term consequences remain a source of social, cultural, and political tensions in France and its former colony. In Sessions's view, French expansion in North Africa was rooted in contests over sovereignty and male citizenship in the wake of the Atlantic revolutions of the eighteenth century. The French monarchy embraced warfare as a means to legitimize new forms of rule, incorporating the Algerian army into royal iconography and public festivals. Colorful broadsides, songs, and plays depicted the men of the Armée d'Afrique as citizen soldiers. Social reformers and colonial theorists formulated plans to settle Algeria with European emigrants. The propaganda used to recruit settlers featured imagery celebrating Algeria's agricultural potential, but the male emigrants who responded were primarily poor, urban laborers who saw the colony as a place to exercise what they saw as their right to work. Generously illustrated with examples of this imperialist iconography, Sessions's work connects a wide-ranging culture of empire to specific policies of colonization during a pivotal period in the genesis of modern France.

Colonising Disability explores the construction and treatment of disability across Britain and its empire from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Esme Cleall explores how disability increasingly became associated with 'difference' and argues that it did so through intersecting with other categories of otherness such as race. Philanthropic, legal, literary, religious, medical, educational, eugenistic and parliamentary texts are examined to unpick representations of disability that, overtime, became pervasive with significant ramifications for disabled people. Cleall also uses multiple examples to show how disabled people navigated a wide range of experiences from 'freak shows' in Britain, to missions in India, to immigration systems in Australia, including exploring how they mobilised to resist discrimination and constitute their own identities. By assessing the intersection between disability and race, Dr Cleall opens up questions about 'normalcy' and the making of the imperial self.