The years between 1790 and 1830 saw over 150 million people brought
under British Imperial control, and one of the most momentous outbursts
of British literary and artistic production, announcing a new world of
social and individual traumas and possibilities. This book traces the
emergence of new forms of imperialism and capitalism as part of a
culture of modernization in the period, and looks at the ways in which
they were identified with, and contested in, Romanticism, through
original readings of texts by Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelley and
Scott.