Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British Atlantic World, 1770-1850

By addressing these and other intriguing questions, Kevin Hutchings highlights significant intersections between Green Romanticism and colonial politics, demonstrating how contemporary understandings of animality, climate, and habitat informed literary and cross-cultural debates about race, slavery, colonialism, and nature in the British Atlantic world. Revealing an innovative dialogue between British, African, and Native American writers of the Romantic period, this book will be of interest to anyone wishing to consider the interconnected histories of transatlantic colonial relations and environmental thought. Why did Afro-British writer and abolitionist Ignatius Sancho rail against the abuse of domestic animals in the eighteenth-century London marketplace? Why did Samuel Taylor Coleridge attack the institution of slavery by writing a poem about animal rights? Did William Blake's allegorical depiction of American colonialism as an act of sexual and ecological violence make him an early ecofeminist? When nineteenth-century Ojibwa author George Copway invoked Wordsworthian Romanticism and quoted various European Romantic poets in his autobiographical accounts of traditional Indigenous hunting practices and religious beliefs, was he embracing - or rejecting - the still-influential Romantic ideal of the "ecologically noble savage"? Afro-British writer and abolitionist Ignatius Sancho railed against the abuse of domestic animals in the eighteenth-century London marketplace. Samuel Taylor Coleridge attacked the institution of slavery by writing a poem about animal rights. William Blake's allegorical depiction of American colonialism was as an act of sexual and ecological violence. By addressing these and other instances, the author highlights significant intersections between green romanticism and colonial politics, demonstrating how contemporary understandings of animality, climate, and habitat informed literary and cross-cultural debates about race, slavery, colonialism, and nature in the British Atlantic world Why did Afro-British writer and abolitionist Ignatius Sancho rail against the abuse of domestic animals in the eighteenth-century London marketplace? Why did Samuel Taylor Coleridge attack the institution of slavery by writing a poem about animal rights? This book answers these questions.