This book is a rich analysis of the visual and textual representations of colonial spaces that were paraded before the British metropolitan public by travel writers and colonial emigration promoters during the early to mid-nineteenth century. It is based on an impressively extensive reading of primary published sources about Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and the USA.

The emphasis in Grant’s analysis is the ways in which sources that broadly promoted colonial emigration ‘mobilised particular conventions and genre devices in pursuit of a range of intellectual, commercial, political, economic and racial objectives’ (p. xi). The introductory chapter sets out the standard features of emigration promotion literature, from illustrative norms to chapter headings and narrative structure. Chapter 2 considers exploration literature in particular. Grant suggests that, by representing landscapes as awaiting exploitation and habitation by Britons, popular texts such as those describing Vancouver’s, Bligh’s and Cook’s voyages, prefigured later writing, which was more explicitly geared towards encouraging emigration. Chapter 3 examines the place of the American West within British visions of a world available for settlement. This chapter serves a useful purpose in drawing greater attention to the role that the USA played in British imperial visions and information circuits. Despite the USA being the most popular destination for emigrants, historians who draw the boundaries of their enquiries more tightly around the Empire itself often overlook this role. For Grant, representations of the USA were also representations of struggle over the British and colonial social order, as competing radical and bourgeois visions of social transformation were played out on the tabula rasa of the US West. Wakefield in particular drew on references to an imagined USA in his depiction of a much more progressive (and bourgeois dominated) settlement scheme for South Australia.

Grant’s next chapter focuses on literature that was explicitly intended to attract settlers from Britain to specific colonies. He shows how important this literature was in influencing the direction of the considerable flows of emigration from Britain during the nineteenth century, highlighting the narrative and representational devices that each source used to promulgate the advantages of one colony over another. As part of this analysis, Grant examines shifting representations of indigenous peoples. Each writer had a vested interest in portraying their own ‘natives’ as pliant or potentially ‘useful’, while representing those of other colonies more as obstacles to settlement. Within these broad imperatives, though, Grant makes a compelling case for the ‘special place’ that was accorded to the Maori. More frequently than other peoples, they were considered as being especially capable of ‘redemption’ and ‘civilisation’ at the hands of the right sort of Britons. This theme is continued in the next chapter, where the focus is largely upon hegemonic, but always contested, humanitarian inclined representations in the first half of the nineteenth century. Ernest Dieffenbach’s scientific accounts of New Zealand and the Maori serve here as a case study of popular ethnographic writing.

Grant turns next to the representations of Britain itself that featured in these accounts. In colonial promotional literature, images of the British metropole were often deployed as the unsavoury alternative to the freedom and promise of colonial landscapes. Representations either of urban overcrowding or of rural decay in Britain could be contrasted with colonial landscapes harbouring the potential of a respectable and comfortable lifestyle for all.

Chapter 7 analyses promotional literature’s advice about the kinds of people who were most suitable as emigrants. These, as one might expect, lay in between the extremes of the extravagant and idle aristocracy on the one hand, and the shiftless poor on the other. The potential of a comfortable existence in the colonies could be fulfilled only through hard work. Even in the most assertive of promotional texts, success in the colonies was never portrayed as an entitlement. As the ensuing chapter shows, although promotional literature was generally aimed squarely at men, with the settler colonies constructed as spaces for the regeneration of an increasingly effete metropolitan masculinity, there was also advice to be had about the proper roles of women as virtuous helpmeets and domestic managers. Grant goes on to argue in chapter 9 that, in prefiguring colonial environments for those Britons who were thinking of emigrating, these promotional texts and images were effectively ‘training’ potential emigrants how to behave once they had arrived in the colonies.

Expectations of indigenous people’s behaviour too, were shaped by promotional literature, as well as by the occasional visit of indigenous peoples to Britain for what Grant calls the ‘ethnotainment’ of the metropolitan public. It is these representations of ‘race’ that Grant returns to in the last substantive chapter of the book. Noting that dominant representations of racial difference shifted from a grounding in universalism to one in biological determinism during the course of the mid-nineteenth century, and charting the accompanying settler achievement of self-government, Grant shows how indigenous peoples in the settler colonies came increasingly to be figured as colourful objects of curiosity rather than obstacles standing in the way of the emigrant.

Although Grant aims to examine what this wide range of texts and images from the colonies meant for the metropolitan readers who were exposed to them, analysing the consumption, rather than the production, of representations is always a difficult task. Nevertheless, he does argue persuasively that it was not only those seriously thinking of emigrating, and seeking useful information to guide their choice of location, who consumed promotional literature from the colonies. With its scientific, religious and geographical content, emigration literature was of far broader interest. It was part, as Grant says, ‘of the general hubbub of nineteenth-century British life’ (p. 16).

Grant’s main achievement is to have covered such a wide range of emigration promotion literature from such a diverse terrain of colonial, and extra-imperial spaces, and to have uncovered consistent visual and textual tropes and conventions. Occasionally, his nuanced and interesting reading of this material is set in the context of, or inspired by, an acknowledged pre-existing secondary literature on colonial discourse and representation, but more often the analysis is pursued with relatively little reference to other scholars’ arguments. In places this is a strength, since it leads to original insight based upon a very close reading of the primary sources in their own right and in their own context. In other places, though, it means that well-rehearsed arguments are presented as if they are original. To give a couple of examples, Grant’s comments about settler writers connecting the Maori with ancient Indo-European races could have been contextualised with reference to Tony Ballantyne’s ‘Orientalism and Race’ 1, while representations of the American West’s landscapes could have been analysed in the light of Stephen Daniels’ ‘Fields of Vision’ 2. One other minor error is one of context: when Natal settlers and writers used the word ‘kaffir’, they were not referring to the Xhosa, the name with which Grant replaces their derogatory term, but to the local Zulu people. Nevertheless these are minor slippages. As a whole this book serves as an example of how visual and textual analyses can be blended to reveal the grip on metropolitan imaginations that colonial landscapes and peoples could exert during the nineteenth century. As such, I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of British colonisation.

Notes:
1 Ballantyne, Tony, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, Basingstoke 2002.
2 Daniels, Stephen, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States, Cambridge 1993.