This volume examines Romantic literary discourse in relation to colonial politics and the peoples and places with which the British were increasingly coming into contact. It investigates topics from slavery to tropical disease, religion and commodity production, in a wide range of writers from Edmund Burke to Hannah More, William Blake to Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano to Mary Shelley, Thomas Clarkson to Lord Byron. Together, the essays constitute a broad assessment of Romanticism's engagement with India, Africa, the West Indies, South America and the Middle East.