8. Pam Perkins’s essay, ‘“Such Classic Ground”: Women and the Romantic-Era Scottish Tour’ addresses the subject of tours in Scotland and explores the way in which domestic travel potentially offered tourists an encounter with scenes that could be deemed ‘classic’ owing to their cultural resonance. Rather than declare any enthusiasm for the work of the enormously influential Scott, however, Anne Grant of Laggan in Letters from the Mountains (1806) presented Highland tourism as providing access to a Scotland which she aligned with the classical Greece of Homer and the Ossianic epics of James Macpherson; after returning to Scotland from America at the age of seventeen, Grant fashioned herself as a cultural insider and argued that a knowledge of Gaelic was a prerequisite for full appreciation of Highland landscape and culture. Perkins goes on to discuss Elizabeth Spence and Eliza Fletcher as figures who, though they showed little interest in Homeric or Ossianic associations, nonetheless suggested in a similar fashion to Grant that the Highland tour could function as the socially exclusive continental Grand Tour did for elite men, as a form of improving cultural education.

6. Jim Kelly’s chapter ‘“A Scene of Terror, Tumult, and Confusion”: Irish Gothic Tourism’ addresses early-nineteenth-century tourism in Ireland, acknowledging both the foreignness of Ireland to most Britons and the distinctive valence of ruin in a context where it was harder to consign confessional conflicts to the past. Kelly’s discussion of travellers’ encounters with ruined abbeys emphasizes the cross-fertilization of travel writing and fiction in this period. It considers the visits of tourists such as Anne Plumptre and Richard Colt Hoare to Muckross Abbey in Killarney (where the presence of human remains compromised aesthetic appreciation), and then explores the representation of the ruins of Bonamargy Abbey, Antrim in Lady Morgan’s O’Donnell (1814) and of Kilmallock Abbey near Limerick in Alicia Le Fanu’s Tales of a Tourist (1823). Morgan and Le Fanu sometimes associated Irish ruin with a proud national heritage and satirized the ignorance of English travellers, although as Kelly concludes, contemporary efforts (such as those of Dublin artist Thomas Bell) to understand Irish Gothic architecture in the terms of a wider revivalism would remain shadowed by sectarian division.

1. James Watt’s ‘Discovering Britain and Ireland: Goldsmith’s Grand Tours’ focuses on Oliver Goldsmith’s sophisticated use of tourist personae, notably an ‘English gentleman’ in rural Ireland and the Chinese philosopher Lien Chi Altangi in London. The works which feature these imaginary travellers in different ways explore the connection between Britain, Ireland, and the wider world, and The Citizen of the World (1762) uses Altangi to reckon with the effects of British expansion in North America. Albeit that Goldsmith met the Cherokee warrior-chief Ostenaco when the latter came to London on a diplomatic mission, Goldsmith made no attempt to imagine an Indigenous perspective on Britain. His writings are primarily concerned with the domestic impact of British colonization overseas and offer little commentary on the relationship between Britain and Ireland, although as Watt shows here, Goldsmith’s ‘Description of the Manners and Customs of the Native Irish’ (a discussion of which bookends the chapter) suggestively performs, for critical purposes, the insouciance of an English ‘discoverer’ of Ireland.

This fourth chapter assesses how indenture grew from its modest beginnings in British Guiana and Mauritius into a global labor system linking the breadth of Britain’s plantation colonies. With the parliamentary critics of slavery and indenture in abeyance and labor organization established as a keystone of colonial and imperial governance in the colonies where it was employed, the overseer-state was free to expand across the empire. It still faced structural, legal, and moral challenges. The most significant obstacle, for the supporters of indenture, was reconciling a system that was exploitative and inherently unfree with the discourses of Liberalism, “free labor,” moral colonization, and just rule. This, in many respects, was the imperial project in microcosm, and the responses of policy, practice, and public discourse adopted to defend indenture developed in tandem with the broader redefinition of the British Empire as a whole.

Chapter 3 argues that during the crucial transition from slavery to apprenticeship and thence to indenture and “free labor” in the 1830s, the state’s oversight of colonial labor systems became one of the most prominent and powerful aspects of colonial governance. The chapter first assesses the central role of the post-emancipation state in colonial labor management in Jamaica, Britain’s most populous, politically prominent, and wealthy colony in the Americas. It then explores the first attempts to introduce Indian indentured labor in British Guiana and Mauritius, examining the motivations for the adaptation of this centuries-old labor system to a nineteenth-century context. In the Indian Ocean World, the state apparatus of ameliorated slavery was merged with the preexisting models of coerced labor that had been employed in southern India and Ceylon, and with established practices of penal transportation. This initial attempt to expand the indenture system from its modest origins, mired in mismanagement and public scandal, was a failure.

Examining the transition from slavery to free labor through the lens of the overseer-state, this chapter clarifies the ascent of labor regulation to a key preoccupation of colonial rule, reveals plantation colonies as sites of experimentation in interventionist governance, and illuminates the evolving relationship between colony and metropole (and different colonies to one another). The analytical framework of the overseer-state also demonstrates how the changing character of colonial labor management entangled British and Continental European modes of imperialism, complicating our historical understanding of the role played by liberal ideology in British imperial governance and political discourse. The overseer-state, concretely and conceptually, bridged the histories of the British Empire and the French, Spanish, and Dutch Empires, revealing how the development of labor control mechanisms in Britain’s plantation colonies remained a European enterprise rather than merely a British one.

The introduction examines the historiography on slavery, abolition, indenture, and the Indian and Chinese labor diasporas in the nineteenth century. It unpacks the analytical framework of “the overseer-state,” demonstrating its usefulness for our historical understanding of these topics.