Marcus Wood

Sara Salih

Deirdre Coleman

Diana Paton

Felicity Nussbaum

Maroula Joannou

George Boulukos

Lincoln Shlensky

Gerald M. MacLean

Slavery as depicted in literature and culture is examined in this wide-ranging collection.

Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807

Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition

This fully-annotated edition of Anna Maria Falconbridge's "Two Voyages to Sierra Leone" (1794) and Mary Ann Parker's "A Voyage Round the World" (1795) brings together the first published accounts by women of these new sites of British colonization. Editor based at University of Sydney.

Two Women's Travel Narratives of the 1790s

Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies

Lecturer in the Department of English Deirdre Coleman

Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery

In 1771 Joseph Banks and other wealthy collectors sent a talented, self-taught naturalist to Sierra Leone to collect all things rare and curious, from moths to monkeys. Henry Smeathman's expedition to the West African coast, which coincided with a steep rise in British slave trading in this area, lasted four years during which time he built a house on the Banana Islands, married into the coast's ruling dynasties, and managed to negotiate the tricky life of a 'stranger' bound to his landlord and local customs. In this book, which draws on a rich and little-known archive of journals and letters, Coleman retraces Smeathman's life as he shuttled between his home on the Bananas and two key Liverpool trading forts - Bunce Island and the Isles de Los. In the logistical challenges of tropical collecting and the dispatch of specimens across the middle passage we see the close connection between science and slavery. We also see the hardening of Smeathman's attitude towards the slaves, a change of sentiment which was later reversed by four years in the West Indies. The book concludes with the 'Flycatcher' back in London - a celebrated termite specialist, eager to return to West Africa to establish a free, antislavery settlement.

Natural History, Slavery, and Empire in the Late Eighteenth Century

Henry Smeathman, the Flycatcher

Deirdre Coleman

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