Previous scholarship on the end of indenture in the British Empire has asserted that a revived and reinvigorated humanitarian movement coincided with a series of public scandals over indenture and the increasingly vehement objections of the Indian and Chinese governments. Chapter 7 demonstrates how the model of the overseer-state prompts a very different perspective on the “second abolition.” This chapter argues that the expansion of the indenture system created the blueprint for its own undoing. It did so in three primary ways. First, it tied labor relations, labor immigration, and the moral and physical well-being of the indentured workforce indelibly to state agents and institutions of governance. Second, it entangled the operation of this labor governance in disparate regions of the empire, ensuring that issues arising in one region reverberated politically and economically throughout the system. And third, its own processes of recordkeeping, adjudication, inquiry, and oversight provided a channel along which the suffering and discontent of those under its yoke could be communicated to both the public and the highest levels of government.

Chapter 6 focuses on the British Straits Settlements and the Malay States. At the edge of the imperial frontier, where Chinese organizations and their attendant customs had long held sway, British laws and institutions struggled to gain a foothold. From its precarious state in the early 1870s, in the course of a few decades, Britain’s toehold on the Malay Peninsula would solidify in the Straits Settlements and extend to encompass the Malay States. The rapid extension of state control over labor transformed one of the empire’s most strategically vital cities and some of its most inaccessible and unruly territory from, or so British officials would claim, locales of lawless immorality to models of civilized behavior, orderly governance, and stable prosperity. As the overseer-state struggled to establish its political supremacy against highly resilient cultural and economic systems established previously by the Chinese Secret Societies and kongsi, its success or failure hinged increasingly on its ontological power to define moral governance and just rule. In this sense, British colonial authority in the Straits Settlements was synonymous with regulation of the Chinese workforce.

7. Ian Duncan’s ‘Experimental Tourism: Aesthetics, Science, and World History in the Highlands’ focuses on Scottish tour literature written as the Highlands were forcibly integrated into the British state and capitalist economy, and as a dialectic of ‘improvement and romance’ (in Womack’s phrase) produced cleared and depopulated regions as tourist destinations. He contrasts Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland with Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, arguing that the former – against Johnson’s sense of a ‘desertified’ landscape – responds to the Highlands as a theatre of the sublime even as it also acknowledges the displacement of Highlanders themselves. As Duncan shows, Highland tourism generated imaginative engagement with the new science of geology as well as providing a stimulus for conjectural history and literary innovation. He concludes by reading Walter Scott’s poetic romance The Lady of the Lake as staging a discovery of Scotland according to which the Trossachs offer a portal through which larger world-historical forces, both natural and human, may be apprehended.

10. Alison O’Byrne’s ‘Foreign Travellers’ Views of Romantic London’ acknowledges the ‘cultural cringe’ which many eighteenth-century Britons performed before their European counterparts, but also identifies a strain of Anglophile appreciation from visitors such as Voltaire onwards who saw London, via the Spectator, as a city which in its dynamism and prosperity exceeded comparison with any European rival. From the 1790s, as O’Byrne shows, other European travellers for the most part admiringly recognized London’s status as a commercial capital as exemplifying a practical sense of liberty, which they defined against the theory-inspired excesses of the French Revolution. While mid-eighteenth-century Britons often lamented its unremarkable appearance, London from the early nineteenth century became more architecturally impressive, partly through the commemoration of victory over Napoleon. As O’Byrne concludes, however, even the most enthusiastic accounts of London as a ‘world city’ were shadowed by a sense of the contingency and precariousness of this pre-eminence.

4. Elizabeth Edwards’s essay ‘Watercolour, Extreme Weather, Electricity: Cornelius Varley in North Wales 1802–5’ emphasizes both that domestic tourism shaped knowledge of Britain and Ireland and that forms of artistic practice helped to constitute their subject rather than simply reproducing it. Edwards focuses on the scientifically inspired observations of the self-taught artist Cornelius Varley during his turn-of-the-century Welsh tour, and she shows how he used the medium of watercolour to capture the distinctive atmospheric conditions that he encountered. Varley’s painting helped to enhance the cultural status of watercolour art and at the same time to raise further the profile of Welsh sites and subject matter, already a feature of works displayed at Royal Academy exhibitions. Edwards demonstrates the interplay between the scientific observation of Varley’s travel manuscripts and the visual form of works such as his ‘Mountain Panorama in Wales, Cader Idris’, and she argues that his attention to ‘atmosphere’ made possible related forms of discovery, advancing scientific enquiry in the fields of meteorology and electricity while promoting the tourist appeal of north Wales.

Chapter 5, focusing mainly on Mauritius and British Guiana, examines the ongoing dialogue between indentured workers, magistrates, public commentators, and colonial administrators over the laws governing labor and their underlying principles. By the 1860s and 1870s, the increasing dissonance between Indians’ perceptions of justice and their legal entitlements and magistrates’ hardening line toward labor discipline and public order had prompted more-direct resistance on the part of laborers. State representatives, in response, defended their actions by portraying Indian indentured workers as a largely docile population that benefited from the colonial labor system but was veined through with moral failings and subject to the cynical influence of disruptive individuals. The fissures between the overseer-state and its charges, already apparent even in its early years, were growing into a yawning chasm as a system that billed itself as supportive of “free labor,” Liberal principles, and moral colonial rule increasingly abandoned its paternalist guise to advocate and practice coercion, restriction of labor mobility, and, when deemed necessary, violent suppression of collective action.

9. The two ‘Northern Industrial Tours of the 1790s’ addressed by Jon Mee’s chapter are John Aikin’s A Description of the Country s/r round Manchester (1795) and William Turner’s ‘Northern Tour’ (1797), works which focus on northern England and bear witness to late-eighteenth-century innovations in textile manufacturing, and their wider ramifications. Aikin’s Description sometimes displays a sense of wonder in the face of the new world that it discovers, and it conjoins ideas of ‘improvement’ and social progress, albeit that as Mee demonstrates, it acknowledges the underside of economic growth too, by recognizing not only the connections between investment capital and the slave trade but also the negative environmental impact created by the harnessing of technological ingenuity. Turner more than Aikin addressed the social implications of improvement, highlighting the emergence of a new ‘commercial aristocracy’, although like Aikin, Mee argues, he at the same time questioned his and others’ ability to grasp and make sense of the rapidity and scale of change.