This collection of essays collects the leading scholars on British colonial thought in Southeast Asia to consider the question: what was the relationship between liberalism and the British Empire in Southeast Asia? The empire builders in Southeast Asia: Lord Minto, William Farquhar, John Leyden, Thomas Stamford Raffles, and John Crawfurd - to name a few - were fervent believers in a liberal free trade order in Southeast Asia. Many recent studies of British imperialism, and European imperialism more generally, have addressed how the anti-imperialist tradition of Eighteenth century liberalism was increasingly intertwined with the discourses of empire, freedom, race and economics in the nineteenth century. This collection extends those studies to look at the impact of liberalism on. British colonialism in Southeast Asia and early nineteenth century Southeast Asia we see some of the first attempts at developing multicultural democracies within the colonies, experiments in free trade and attempts to use free trade to prevent war and colonisation.

1819 was the annus mirabilis for many British Romantic writers, and the annus terribilis for demonstrators protesting the state of parliamentary representation. In 1819 Keats wrote what many consider his greatest poetry. This was the year of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, and Ode to the West Wind. Wordsworth published his most widely reviewed work, Peter Bell, and the craze for Walter Scott's historical novels reached its zenith. Many of these writings explicitly engaged with the politics of representation in 1819, especially the great movement for reform that was fueled by threats of mass emigration to America and came to a head that August with an unprovoked attack on unarmed men, women, and children in St. Peter's Field, Manchester, a massacre that journalists dubbed "Peterloo." But the year of Peterloo in British history is notable for more than just the volume, value, and topicality of its literature. Much of the writing from 1819, argues James Chandler, was acutely aware not only of its place in history, but also of its place as history - a realization of a literary "spirit of the age" that resonates strongly with the current "return to history" in literary studies. Chandler explores the ties between Romantic and contemporary historicism, such as the shared tendency to seize a single dated event as both important on its own and as a "case" testing general principles. To animate these issues, Chandler offers a series of cases of his own built around key texts from 1819.